Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English-language Translation

Zuzana Havlásková

Interference in Students’ Translations Master‟s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Renata Kamenická, Ph. D.

2010

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I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author‟s signature

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Acknowledgement Above all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Renata Kamenická, Ph.D., for her valuable

help and guidance of my work, and for the materials which she gave me for the analysis. I would also like to thank the students and teachers who submitted the interference identification

task and filled in the questionnaires because they indeed contributed to my work.

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Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION 6

2. INTERFERENCE AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS 8

2.1. Paul Kussmaul’s Approach towards Interference and the Path

towards Proficiency 13

2.2. Other Concepts Related to Interference 16

2.3. Interlanguage 21

3. CLASSIFICATIONS AND RESEARCH INTO INTERFERENCE 25

3.1. Classification according to Thorovský 25

3.2. Classification of the Three Key Factors in Interference

according to Hopkinson 29

3.3. Brenda Malkiel’s Research into Interference 33

3.4. Research into Interference in Scientific and Technical

Translation by Javier Franco Aixelá 35

4. ANALYSIS 39

4.1. Corpus and Method 40

4.2. Classification of Interference for the Purpose of this

Research 43

4.2.1. Lexical Interference 43

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4.2.2. Syntactic Interference 51

4.2.3. Grammatical Interference 55

4.2.4. Borderline Cases 58

4.2.5. Interference in Typography 61

4.2.6. Miscellaneous 62

5. RESULTS FROM THE ANALYSIS 65

5.1. Results Summarizing the Types of Interferences in

Individual Texts 65

5.2. Results Summarizing the Types of Interferences in Concrete

Students’ Translations 69

5.3. Interesting Examples 74

6. SUPPLEMENTARY DATA: COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS 77

6.1. Interference Identification Task 77

6.2. Questionnaires 81

7. TRIANGULATION 85

8. CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 89

9. RÉSUMÉ 91

9.1. English 91

9.2. Czech 92

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1. INTRODUCTION

The main objective of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive analysis of

the occurrence of interference in students‟ translations. The research will

consist of three major parts: first, the analysis of interference in students‟

translations, second, interference identification task for students and teachers of

translation, and finally, the questionnaires asking students about their view of

interference. Nevertheless, the analysis of interference occurring in students‟

translations forms the most important part of the research. The results will be

summarized at the end of each part and triangulated in the conclusion.

As far as the outline of this thesis is concerned, chapter 2 will deal with

theoretical views of this phenomenon. Interference and its characteristics will be

presented, definitions by several scholars will be mentioned and different

approaches towards interference will be discussed. Chapter 3 will be devoted to

classifications and research by four scholars dealing with interference, and

starting with chapter 4, which will focus on the actual analysis, the research will

be purely practical. The corpus and the method of research will be presented

and the classification as we have determined it for the purpose of this thesis will

be outlined. The following chapter 5 will focus on the results from the analysis of

students‟ translations. The supplementary data, i.e. the interference

identification task and questionnaires, will be included in chapter 6. The most

important data obtained will be summarized and triangulated in chapter 7 and

they will hopefully reveal the main tendencies, some interesting observations

and evidence which will be useful for further investigations. And finally, chapter

8 will conclude this thesis and suggestions for further research will be discussed

there.

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The Appendix at the end of this thesis and the enclosed CD contain all the

relevant materials and tables which were used for the research. Concretely,

complete table with results from the analyses of students‟ translations and

answers from questionnaires can be found in the Appendix. All the other

materials – i.e. source texts and analyses of individual texts, questionnaire,

translation which served as a text for the interference identification task and

results from it – will be included on the CD.

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2. INTERFERENCE AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS

This chapter is devoted purely to interference, its definitions and

characteristics. Interference designates a phenomenon in which a certain

expression or a passage from the source text is literally transferred into the

target text. It may include a literal translation of a word, a phrase, an idiom, a

metaphor, a term or of a whole syntactic structure. Anglicisms are thus

interferences from English; i.e., anglicisms involve words, idioms, phrases

literally (and mostly inappropriately) translated from English into another

language (in our case, into Czech). To a certain degree, the concept of

interference seems rather indefinite. Nobody can specify where exactly the

boundary between interference and an accurate (but correct) translation lies.

The determination of what interference is and what is not is therefore

sometimes subjective and, in some cases, it can be individual-dependent. What

someone considers as interference from the source language, someone else

can perceive as a different kind of mistake or even as a perfectly acceptable

solution in the target language. Nevertheless, in most cases, interference is

evident at first sight and the reader sometimes realizes it even without reading

the source text. He/she can either feel there is something “unnatural” in the text

or the text seems obscure and incomprehensible (in case that an error occurs

due to interference and the text is thus misunderstood). Generally speaking,

interference is a phenomenon that is common to many translations and its

occurrence varies according to the experience of a translator.

Gideon Toury presents the Interference Law and describes it in the following

way:

“According to the law of interference, phenomena pertaining to the make-up of the source text tend to be transferred to the target text. The extent

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to which interference is realized depends on the professional experience of the translator and the sociocultural conditions in which a translation is produced and consumed, so that experienced translators tend to be less affected by the make-up of the source-text, and tolerance towards interference tends to increase when translation is carried out from a highly prestigious culture.” (Baker 2009: 307)

To sum up his statement, Toury mentions one major fact which plays an

important role in the manifestation of interference and that is the professional

experience of a translator. It is generally regarded that students‟ translations

contain more interference that those of the professional translators who have far

more experience and are better able to withstand interference. Paul Kussmaul

argues that “we can observe interference both in novices and in advanced

translators” (Kussmaul 1995: 17-18); but, although even professional translators

sometimes have difficulties and doubts about the quality of their translations,

the frequency of occurrence of interference will be greater in works of

translation trainees.

“Identifying the differences between novices and professional translators has been a major concern of Translation Studies. The assumption in the field is that training and experience contribute to translation quality, such that trained, experienced translators will generally produce higher-quality translations than untrained, inexperienced translators” (Malkiel 2006: 338).

The presence of interference is one of the factors which affects the quality of

the final product, and which is subject to the level of experience. In other words,

interference is, in a way, a universal phenomenon which very often occurs in

students‟ translations and it therefore deserves more attention. Toury,

moreover, states that interference seems to be more tolerated in translations

from a highly prestigious culture (in a way, this claim has to do with the

concepts presented later in chapter 2.2.). Kufnerová, in her book “Překládání a

čeština”, adds that a translator is always influenced by the source text language

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and the degree of this influence depends on the tradition of translating from the

given culture (Kufnerová 1994: 47-48).

Another theoretician studying and researching interference is Javier Franco

Aixelá. According to him, interference “is the importation into the target text of

lexical, syntactic, cultural or structural items typical of a different semiotic

system and unusual or non-existent in the target context” (Franco Aixelá 2009:

75). Interference is thus manifestation of forms or words „unusual‟ or even „non-

existent‟ in the target language whose importation into the target text is

obviously caused by the source-text formulations. In his paper researching

lexical interference, Martin Thorovský says: “By „linguistic interference‟ I mean

an unintentional transfer of some elements of the source language (SL) to the

target language (TL)” (Thorovský 2009: 86). Thorovský thereby clearly

expresses that interferences are “unintentional” and thus unconscious

tendencies which result in mistakes in translations. Brenda Malkiel, another

researcher, examines interference from a different perspective and she

operates with this phenomenon in a different context. Besides L1 translations,

her corpus contains also translations into the subjects‟ second language.

Translation from L1 into L2 can cause that the tendency to interference is

stronger than under the more favourable conditions (as denominated by Toury

1978: 224) – sometimes referred to as “more natural” direction of translation

(translation into one‟s mother tongue, i.e. L2 into L1 direction). Christopher

Hopkinson confirms this claim and states that “the issue of linguistic

interference is a factor in any translation, and when the translator is working

from L1 into L2, interference from the L1 source text becomes a key element in

the production of the L2 target text” (Hopkinson 2007: 13). Logically, it is likely

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that there will be more interference in translations into someone‟s second

language; but, the “strange” and surprising thing is that interference occurs

even in L1 translation (which is the subject of this thesis). As Brenda Malkiel

confirms, “interference is not only a feature of into-L2 translation, but of into-L1

translation as well” (Malkiel 2006: 339). In this direction, translators work into

their mother tongue and they are assumed to have perfect command of it.

Building correct sentences and natural expressions should be effortless in the

mother tongue; nevertheless, translations show that it is not always the case.

Translators seem to be largely influenced by the source text (which lies in the

centre of attention of this research).

Discussing some of the possible explanations of interference, we should

also mention how Peter Newmark interprets this concept in one of the

elementary manuals designed primarily for students of translation, in the

Glossary at the end of “A Textbook of Translation”. Newmark says that

interference is “literal translation from SL or third language that does not give

the right or required sense” (Newmark 1988: 283). This definition is disputable

because it differs from what we imagine under the concept of interference. In

fact, he reduces this phenomenon on the level of a word and considers the

sense as the most important aspect. From his perspective, an expression

whose meaning in the source text is understood correctly (and thus the sense is

preserved in the target text) but whose formulation is unnatural and clumsy, is

not considered as an interference. In this research, we study interference in a

broader context. We do not limit only on the lexical level, but we examine even

interferences which occur above the word level (syntactic interference,

interference in typography, grammatical interference, etc.). According to this

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Newmark‟s claim, interference means literal translation of a word and thus

misunderstanding the sense. This definition is too concise and general;

nevertheless, in his book “About Translation”, he already deals with this issue in

more detail. He admits that interference occurs even above the level of words

and, in a broader sense, it can affect proper names, punctuation, cultural

elements, etc.

“In the narrow definition, interference takes place when, apparently inappropriately, any feature of the source or a third language – notably a syntactic structure, a lexical item, an idiom, a metaphor, or word-order – is carried over or literally translated as the case may be into the target language (TL) text.” (Newmark 1991: 78)

Moreover, in “About Translation”, Newmark mentions the fact that certain

types of interference can have its virtues. According to him, it can sometimes be

seen also as a positive aspect of a translation. “In translation, there are various

degrees of interference, and its appropriacy depends partly on the type of text

that is translated; in a literary work, both idiolectal and cultural interference often

enriches the translation” (Newmark 1991: 78). In other words, the occurrence of

interference is intentional and even desirable in some cases, and it does not

always have to be an error. Similar views of foreign elements occurring in

translations will be discussed in chapter 2.2. Nevertheless, we will be dealing

with interference which appears in students‟ translations unintentionally and its

occurrence in the target texts is thus undesirable. In this research, interference

is perceived as a phenomenon which causes difficulties for the students and

they are trying to avoid its occurrence in their translations.

As has already been suggested above, clumsy and unnatural formulations

can very often serve as indicators of interference occurring in translations. In

the context of this thesis, even sentences whose meaning is preserved, but

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which strike the attention of the reader (because they sound weird) can serve

as indicators of interference. The concrete criteria according to which

interferences are identified in the analysis will be presented in chapter 4.

To conclude, interference is a phenomenon occurring in most translations

which means that it could be considered a kind of translation universal. Gideon

Toury supports this claim and says that “virtually no translation is completely

devoid of formal equivalents, i.e., of manifestations of interlanguage” (Toury

1978: 226). Most translations are, in some way, influenced by the language of

the original text from which they are translated. The amount of interference

depends on the proficiency of a translator; therefore, in translations done by

students, interference is likely to occur with greater frequency. The following

chapters will focus on different approaches towards interference and other

concepts related to this phenomenon.

2.1. Paul Kussmaul’s Approach towards Interference and the Path

towards Proficiency

A separate chapter will be devoted to Paul Kussmaul‟s approach because

he deals with didactics rather than with definitions and his perception of

interference is quite specific. He regards interference as a phenomenon against

which the students are constantly warned and he states that its importance is

sometimes exaggerated.

Kussmaul describes interference as a phenomenon that constitutes a

problem in translations but, at the same time, he adopts a slightly different

attitude. He touches on the hypothesis of the fear of interference; he argues that

although interference definitely is a problem and it can cause errors, the fear of

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it is sometimes exaggerated. Translators, trying to avoid an error, pay too much

attention to it and, for example, in cases where it would be absolutely correct to

preserve the form of a word from the ST in the TT (use the “good friend” or a

formally corresponding word), they prefer to use another expression to avoid

potential mistake.

“They must have learnt that in many cases the formally similar word in the

target language leads to “big blunders”, and they will most likely have been

warned of these by their teachers” (Kussmaul 1995: 19). As they are constantly

warned against errors caused by interference, translators start worrying about

using a formally corresponding word or phrase. The subjects still have in mind

the “rule” they have been taught – never rely on the equivalence of a formally

similar word – and so the exaggerated fear of interference sometimes manifests

in the process of translation.

“There is a long tradition in foreign language and also in translation teaching to warn students of false friends and ensuing interferences. Although teaching experience shows that interferences are typical causes for mistranslations warnings of them may lead to a general insecurity with the effect that students do not dare to look beyond the word-border. Such warnings should therefore always be counterbalanced by contextual considerations” (Kussmaul 1995: 19).

This education leads to the fact that when translators come across a

potential false friend or a ST word formally correspondent to a TT word, they

automatically try to avoid it without considering the whole context in which it

appears. They focus their attention on the word itself (they reduce the unit of

translation to the word level) and leave the broader context aside. “The reason

for this may be found in an attitude where individual parts of the text become

more important than the text as a whole” (Kussmaul 1995: 19). In such

situations, students rely on the word-for-word translation method and they

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create a clumsy phrase or a sentence structure that sounds weird. It is thus

important to extend our attention to the level above the word. On that account,

this thesis examines (among other things) syntactic and phrasal interference;

i.e., the problem of entire structures literally translated into Czech is taken into

account in the analysis.

Interference definitely is a problem that re-occurs in students‟ translations

and that can be improved mainly by training and thus obtaining experience,

which supports Toury‟s claim that interference is directly proportional to the

expertise of a translator. Paul Kussmaul confirms this approach: “The biggest

problem, however, is that a translator without sufficient linguistic sensitivity will

not notice these things at all. The only advice that can be given is to improve

one‟s linguistic competence both in the mother tongue and in the foreign

language” (Kussmaul 1995: 17). Although the acquisition of knowledge can

never be absolutely perfect and complete (it is impossible for a foreign language

student to learn all the potential meanings of a word), translator‟s competence

will improve and higher sensitivity in choice of words will be evident in the

course of gaining experience. Brenda Malkiel touches on the topic of

translator‟s competence and the importance of experience as far as the quality

of the final product is concerned.

“The lay view of translation as a straightforward and rather simple task and of translator as someone who knows several languages has very little to do with the reality of professional translation. Professional translation is a highly complex undertaking, which requires a wealth of expertise and can be dauntingly difficult. By its very nature, professional translation involves decision making, compromise, and problem solving” (Malkiel 2006: 337).

The overattention to potential interferences can cause that the translator will

finally lack self-confidence in formulating TTs, still having in mind the warnings

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against formally correspondent expressions. The subject will focus his/her

attention on the word level and he/she will ignore larger syntactic structures and

context.

“In addition to the advice that one should improve one‟s foreign language competence I would suggest that teachers should try to make students aware of what goes on in their minds during the process of understanding so that eventually they may internalize these processes.” (Kussmaul 1995: 22)

To conclude, translators should undoubtedly pay as much attention to

interference as necessary but, at the same time, they should not forget to

consider also the context in which a word, or an expression, appears and to

think of other possible or more natural meanings of it in the target text (not to

stick to the first meaning from a dictionary).

2.2. Other Concepts Related to Interference

This subchapter will be devoted to a fairly different view of occurrence of

foreign elements in translations, proposed by Lawrence Venuti, Jiří Levý and

Anton Popovič. Although these theories do not deal directly with interference as

we perceive it in this research, they focus on the occurrence of some kind of

foreignness in target texts which indicates that there is a certain connection

between these phenomena.

Jiří Levý in the 1960s and Anton Popovič in the 1970s raised the issue of the

occurrence of foreign elements (in target texts) which disclosed the fact that a

text was a translation. Jiří Levý (Levý 1983: 96) suggested the idea of the

position of translated texts in national literatures. He states that besides

becoming a part of works written in Czech and of Czech culture, a translation

has moreover one identifying characteristic feature different from the works

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originally written in Czech; it informs the readership about the original text and

the source culture. Levý and Popovič put forward the term překladovost, for

which there are several possible options for translation – Translatedness,

Translativity and Translationality. To make it clear, in this thesis, we will refer to

this concept as Translationality. According to this phenomenon, certain foreign

features occur intentionally in the target texts and their presence indicates that

the text is a translation. The thing interference and translationality have in

common is that they both deal with foreign elements present in target texts. On

the other hand, the difference between these two phenomena is that

interference, as stated in Thorovský‟s paper, is mostly perceived as an

“unintentional transfer of some elements of the source language (SL) to the

target language (TL)” (Thorovský 2009: 86) and it is therefore generally

considered as a mistake. On the other hand, translationality indicates

intentional, sometimes even desirable feature of translation. Levý and Popovič

say that readers sometimes want to know that what they are reading is a

translation so it is appropriate to offer them such awareness by preserving

certain traces of the source text in the target. Translationality can thus become

an aesthetic value of the text (Levý 1983: 96; Popovič 1975: 62-63). In certain

time periods, a hint of “exoticism” can contribute to the success of a translation.

As an example of this statement, we can mention advertisements. For example

in the 1990s in the Czech Republic, right after the Revolution, it was generally

believed that what was foreign had, at the same time, prestige. It was,

therefore, advantageous to keep some kind of foreignness in translations and

advertisements derived benefit from this fact. People did not mind that

interference from English was obvious because they considered it to be a mark

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of prestige. This approach towards interference largely depends on the actual

cultural background.

According to Levý and Popovič, there are two different approaches towards

translation and requirements for it: to read like an original and to bear traces of

the source culture (to inform the target readership about a foreign culture).

Certain connection between the two concepts (translationality and interference)

is obvious. As has already been mentioned above, translationality is not the

same as interference but it is, in a way, a similar concept. Levý and Popovič say

that certain amount of interference from the source text sometimes “does no

harm” and it may be appreciated in some cases. Popovič states that the more

foreign or exotic elements a translation contains, the more likely it is that the

reader will notice that a text is a translation. Moreover, Popovič (1975: 64) says

that the more erudite the target reader, the more probable it is that he/she will

recognize a translation from a non-translated original text (nevertheless, he

applies this claim mainly on poetry and literary norms). Levý (1983: 97)

continues that the degree of culturally different elements depends also on the

target readership. The translator can afford to preserve the amount of national

characteristic issues according to how much awareness of the foreign culture

he can assume his readership has. Levý adds (Levý 1983: 96-97) that the

emphasis on translationality depends mainly on the relationship of the two

cultures and on the current cultural situation in the Czech Republic. Informative

function is usually the stronger, the more “remote” the literature for translation is

and it will thus contain higher proportion of “foreign” elements informing the

readership about the culture and the nature of the original. Supposedly, the

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more foreign the source culture for the readership is, the more foreign elements

(information about the cultural background) the target text will contain.

Jiří Levý (1983: 72) also comments on the influence of the source text

language on the language of the final product, by which he indeed touches on

the notion of interference. He states that the influence can by direct or indirect.

Direct influence of the original text manifests positively and negatively. The

positive influence means that the translation contains unnatural structures

directly translated from the original – this, in fact, has to do with our perception

of the concept of interference. The negative one stands for the absence of

Czech means of expression which the language of the original did not contain.

Levý (1983: 75) confirms that a translated text can be identified at first sight

according to high frequency of certain expressions which, in Czech, seem

grammatically and stylistically correct but which sound unnatural. This claim

corresponds to the concept of interference.

Another theoretician who talks about intentional usage of foreign elements in

target texts is Lawrence Venuti. Venuti deals with an issue similar to the one

presented by Levý and Popovič and he focuses on the concept of foreignization

(as opposed to domestication). These two concepts (foreignization and

translationality) are associated but do not completely overlap. The main

difference lies in their perspectives. Translationality presents mainly descriptive

view as it focuses on norms in certain time periods. It describes how the

perception of foreign elements occurring in translations changed in time.

Moreover, this concept deals primarily with culturally bound information about

foreign culture in translations. On the other hand, foreignization applies the

prescriptive point of view. Foreign elements in translations are used consciously

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and selectively and they serve as signals of foreignness. Foreignization (as

translationality presented by Levý and Popovič) is not really synonymous to the

phenomenon we are dealing with (interference) but certain connection is clear.

The main difference rests in the fact that, in contrast to interference,

foreignization is used intentionally and, in some translations, it is desirable.

According to Venuti, a fluent translation is considered the one which is as

natural as possible, domesticated, and no traces of the source text are

manifested. “Under the regime of fluent translating, the translator works to make

his or her work “invisible”, producing the illusory effect of transparency that

simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems

“natural,” i.e., not translated” (Venuti 1997: 5). During the process of

domestication, the translator tries to delete cultural-specific elements. On the

other hand, foreignization means that the translator keeps fidelity to the original

in the target text.

“Schleiermacher allowed the translator to choose between a domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home, and a foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” (Venuti 1997: 20).

Foreignization (in this respect analogous to translationality) sometimes adds

to the prestige of a translation. Of course, the target culture, the time in which a

translation appears, target readership and type of the text play a key role. More

foreignization will probably be manifested in translations from a highly

prestigious culture into a “marginal” one. On the other hand, translations from a

“marginal” culture into a highly prestigious one tend to be domesticated.

Compared with interference, this characteristic is similar to what Toury states in

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his definition of interference (mentioned above): “tolerance towards interference

tends to increase when translation is carried out from a highly prestigious

culture” (Baker 2009: 307). Generally speaking, it is likely that readers will

accept more foreign language elements in translations from a highly prestigious

culture than from a marginal one.

To conclude, the main characteristic of the concepts dealt with in this

chapter is that they both view certain amount of foreign elements in translations

as a positive aspect. The idea behind this is that the declaration of the fact that

a text is a translation can add to the prestige and can enrich the final product.

2.3. Interlanguage

This subchapter will focus on interlanguage as a concept related to

interference. In the context of this thesis, interlanguage denominates a

language system in which interference is common and in whose context

interference normally arises. It is a kind of a third-code employed in situations in

which two different languages are in contact, for example, in the process of

translation.

Gideon Toury argues that “theoretical considerations [...] lead to

hypothesizing that the language used in translation tends to be interlanguage

(sometimes designated «translationese»), or that a translation is, as it were, an

«inter-text», by definition” (Toury 1978: 227). Christopher Hopkinson applies the

theory of interlanguage on his research dealing with linguistic interference in

translations from Czech into English, i.e. from L1 into L2. Hopkinson

characterizes interlanguage as a particular kind of target language that is

employed in translations and that is influenced by the source language.

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Interlanguage manifests in most translated utterances regardless the direction

of translation and language pair. It is a kind of third code characteristic of this

type of linguistic transfer.

The first person to come up with the idea of interlanguage was Larry

Selinker in 1972 when he wrote an article describing this phenomenon.

Nevertheless, his interpretation of this concept was quite different from what we

are dealing with in this thesis.

“What Selinker maintained was that in the process of second-language learning, not only two linguistic systems are involved, the mother tongue (SL) and the target language, i.e., the language one is trying to learn (TL), but « […] one would be completely justified in hypothesizing, perhaps even compelled to hypothesize, the existence of a separate linguistic system based on the observable output which results from a learner‟s attempted production of a TL norm. This linguistic system we will call «interlanguage» (IL) »” (Selinker in Toury 1978: 223).

Selinker talks about interlanguage in the context of second-language learning; it

means, in the “first stage” of language transfer. In this case, its manifestation is

fairly “tolerated”. In the “second stage” (translation), its manifestation becomes

to be perceived as an undesirable element. Translators try to avoid it and to

disengage from its influence.

Interlanguage is a kind of system which lies somewhere in between SL and

TL. To apply this thesis on our topic, interference can be caused by the

presence of interlanguage when dealing with two different languages. The two

definitions (of interlanguage and interference) have several things in common.

First, in both phenomena, the target text is influenced by the source.

Interference also is, in a sense, a kind of a third code employed in translations

because the word or structure is not naturally Czech (it is created during the

transfer from English) and the influence of the source is evident. Second, both

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are said to improve with gaining experience. “While being conceived of as an

indispensable phase in the process of foreign-language learning, it tends to be

regarded mainly as a phase, i.e., a temporary, changeable state of affairs, the

main justification for whose study is to find proper ways of cutting its measure

down, if not altogether eliminating it“ (Toury 1978: 223). In other words,

frequency of occurrence of interference forms can be reduced by practice and

experience which means that there will be more interference in students‟

translations than in those done by professional translators. Hopkinson adds to

this that “the proportion of L2 elements grows along with the proficiency of the

translator or language learner” (Hopkinson 2007: 14). Third, another

characteristic that these two phenomena have in common is the fact that their

manifestation is undesirable; their presence in translation is generally

considered as inappropriate. And fourth, they are both universal phenomena

emerging in such situations in which two different language systems are in

contact. Interference is present in most translations and interlanguage forms

“are likely to occur whenever and wherever one language is used in some

contact with another” (Toury 1978: 224). Moreover, Toury confirms that “one of

the purest and most common situations of this type is translation, which

inevitably puts the translator, a potential bilingual, in the position of actual,

materialized bilingualism, while bringing the two languages themselves, SL and

TL, into contact through him and his activity” (Toury 1978: 224).

To conclude this chapter, Christopher Hopkinson nicely summarizes the

characteristic features of this phenomenon and outlines the connection between

interlanguage and interference.

“Briefly, the interlanguage theory states that learners‟ (or translators‟) imperfect foreign language production results in an intermediate

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language system – in effect a 'third language' – lying somewhere between two 'true' languages (the L1 and L2). It is this interlanguage which, when it occurs in translation, is sometimes known as 'translationese', and the specific Czech-English interlanguage dealt with here has also been wittily termed 'Czenglish' by Don Sparling“ (Hopkinson 2007: 13).

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3. CLASSIFICATIONS AND RESEARCH INTO INTERFERENCE

This chapter is dedicated to examples of concrete research studies into

interference and some of the possible classifications of interference as stated in

the papers of four different authors – Martin Thorovský, Christopher Hopkinson,

Brenda Malkiel and Javier Franco Aixelá. All of these are dealing with

interference in translations, either from L1 into L2 or vice versa. We will briefly

introduce the research objective of each and, in cases where they present some

type of classification, we will mention their division and provide several

examples.

3.1. Classification according to Thorovský

In his paper titled “Lexical Linguistic Interference in Translations of Science-

Fiction Literature from English into Czech”, Martin Thorovský inquires into

lexical interference, as a subtype of linguistic interference. His corpus consists

of 13 science-fiction books (translations from English into Czech). To clearly

demonstrate the types of interference according to which he classifies the

examples from his corpus, his classification is as follows:

Linguistic Interference:

1. interference at the word and collocation level (lexical interference)

2. grammatical interference

3. syntactic interference

4. interference in orthography

Further subtypes of Lexical Interference:

1. surface lexical interference (false friends)

2. semantic interference

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3. idiomatic interference

4. interference in collocation

5. cultural interference

Thorovský (2009: 86) mentions that one of the major criterions according to

which he identifies interferences is that the translation sounds unnatural. This

claim confirms the previously mentioned argument that expressions or

sentences which sound clumsy or weird can serve as indicators of interference.

“This is one of the potential signs signalling the occurrence of interference in

translation. In many cases, an experienced reader of English literature would be

able to „see the original behind the lines of the translation‟ because of the trace

that interference leaves in the TL” (Thorovský 2009: 86).

Thorovský explores lexical interference and classifies it according to the five

categories mentioned above. “First, surface lexical interference occurs in those

cases where the lexical unit of the source language visually, i.e.

orthographically, resembles a certain lexical unit of the target language, which is

not its equivalent (at least not in the given case)” (Thorovský 2009: 86). By

surface lexical interference Thorovský means literal translations of false friends.

Most of the translations of this type concern words which have a formally similar

equivalent in Czech but whose meaning is different or inappropriate in the given

context. For instance, he gives examples of word pairs such as authority –

*autorita (úřad)1, camera – *kamera (fotoaparát), control – *kontrola (ovládání)

(Thorovský 2009: 87-90).

1 Examples taken from Thorovský‟s paper: Thorovský, Martin (2009) “Lexical Linguistic

Interference in Translations of Science-Fiction Literature from English into Czech.” Ostrava Journal of English Philology, vol. 1: 86-98.

27

The second type, semantic interference, “is caused by an overlap of

meanings between the source lexical unit and the target lexical units, which are

only partial equivalents” (Thorovský 2009: 86). The translator usually relies on

the first meaning from a dictionary or his/her current knowledge, and fails to

consider the whole context in which a word appears. To give concrete examples

of these, Thorovský mentions mistakes which occurred in his corpus and whose

translations are inappropriate for the given context: pup/puppy – *štěně (fracek,

smrad), tripod – *trojnožka (stativ) (Thorovský 2009: 90-91). Thorovský states

that although trojnožka is not really an error, stativ would be more appropriate.

Moreover, he adds that “the polysemic character of „false friends‟ means that

they partially overlap with the second category of interferential mistakes:

semantic interference” (Thorovský 2009: 91).

The third class, idiomatic interference, includes incorrect translations of

idioms “which the translator either did not recognize or misinterpreted as a

collocation” (Thorovský 2009: 86). In such a case, the translator transfers an

idiom literally into Czech; for instance, blew the whistle – *zahvízdat na píšťalku

(prásknout to na koho, bonzovat na koho or, in this context, bít na poplach), It’s

going to be a walk in the park – *Bude to jen procházka v parku (hračka,

zvládnout levou zadní, brnkačka), The shit’s really hit the fan now! – *Hovno

narazilo na větrák! (provalilo se to, prasklo to) (Thorovský 2009: 91-92).

“Fourth, interference in collocation partially resembles semantic interference,

but it affects collocations rather than individual words.” (Thorovský 2009: 86).

The major problem consists in translating literally expressions which collocate in

English but not in Czech; for example, multi-word expressions which have a

* The asterisks indicate examples identified as interferences. The correct translation is in the parentheses.

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single-word equivalent in Czech or collocations which cannot be translated word

for word. As an example, Thorovský mentions break one’s neck – *zlomit si krk

(zlomit si vaz), black woman – *černá žena (černoška), raw materials – *hrubé

materiály (suroviny) and others.

And the last type is cultural interference which “occurs in those cases where

the translator is unable to deal with the cultural difference between the source

language culture and the target language culture. In most cases there is no

direct equivalent in the target language” (Thorovský 2009: 86). One of the

examples of this type of interference, mentioned by Thorovský, is [...] in the

checkout at the 7-Eleven – *[...] při vstupní kontrole v 7-Jedenáct. The problem

here consists in misunderstanding the cultural specific item. “„7-Eleven‟ is a

chain of US stores that sell convenience items such as food, drinks, etc. They

are open from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m.” (Thorovský 2009: 96). Thorovský proposes

two options how to solve this cultural-specific problem: either, to use some more

general term (e.g. store), in case that the name of the store is not important for

the context (e.g. the opening hours do not play a key role in the text), or to add

some word in front of the term, which will explain the name (e.g. obchodní dům

7-Eleven, obchoďák 7-Eleven). Another mistake which occurred due to

misunderstanding was checkout translated as *vstupní kontrola (pokladna).

Under the type of cultural interferences, Thorovský moreover includes

miscellaneous types of errors. Thorovský clarifies that most of the mistakes

included occur when the source text contains a „cultural icon‟ (real historical

person who is well-known in the source culture but not in the target cultural

environment), name of an institution, brand name, measures or colours which

do not have a direct counterpart in Czech. Examples of these are, for instance,

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Dozens ran past the APC – *Několik tuctů jich proběhlo kolem APC (desítky,

spousty, mraky), His long, sandy hair – *Dlouhé pískově žluté vlasy (nazrzlý,

zrzavý).

To conclude, Thorovský conducts his research on a very specific corpus and

classifies the instances of interference according to clearly defined types. He

focuses strictly on lexical interference because he states that this one is the

most common in translations. Unfortunately, in his paper, he does not mention

the concrete results from his analysis as far as the frequency of the individual

types is concerned.

3.2. Classification of the Three Key Factors in Interference according

to Hopkinson

Christopher Hopkinson deals with linguistic interference in L2 translations

(from Czech into English). He does not provide a clear classification of

interference (he does not classify the types of mistakes according to specific

types) but he rather explores the key factors that participate in the occurrence of

interference. Generally, Hopkinson explores interference in lexis, word-

formation, grammar and syntax which means that he focuses his attention even

above the word level. To show schematically his division, the outline of his

paper is as follows (the three key factors in interference):

1. Inadequate reference materials

- Segmentation of the semantic field

- Exact syntactic equivalence in lexical interference

2. Generalisation from false hypotheses

- Lexical generalisation: False cognates

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- Generalisation in word-formation

3. Systemic and structural differences between Czech and English

- Morphological systems

- Syntactic systems

- Grammatical systems

As has already been mentioned above, these are not classifications of

interference but factors which cause its occurrence. It is appropriate to clarify, at

least briefly, what Hopkinson means by these factors.

The first factor, inadequate use of reference materials, causes interferences

mostly on the word level and it includes inadequate work mainly with

dictionaries, corpora and other reference materials. Its subcategory,

segmentation of the semantic field, has to do with what Thorovský would

classify as semantic interference. In such a case, translators rely on the first

example from a dictionary and do not consider wider context of a word (e.g.

kulturní dům2 – *House of Culture (cultural centre), oblíbeným cílem turistů – *a

favourite aim for tourists (a favourite destination for visitors). The second

subcategory, exact syntactic equivalence in lexical interference, causes

interferences similar to Thorovský‟s interference in collocation or semantic

interference (these two partially overlap). The most common examples of this

type are cases in which a Czech single word needs to be expressed by several

words in English; but, the translator fails to do this and attempts to find single-

word translation which is not correct (e.g. nejbližší okolí města – *the nearest

town environs (the area immediately around the town).

2 Examples taken from Hopkinson‟s paper: Hopkinson, Christopher (2007) “Factors in Linguistic Interference: A Casestudy in Translation”. SKASE: Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2 (1). Ostrava.

31

The second factor influencing the occurrence of interference is what

Hopkinson calls generalisation from false hypotheses.

“In this process, translators make incorrect generalisations from their own false hypotheses of the relations between linguistic systems in Czech and English. This factor plays a key role in generating interference at the lexical level and in word-formation. Translators frequently search for regularity in translation processes where no such regularity actually exists, and they (probably unconsciously) create hypotheses governing such processes which they then apply in unsuitable situations” (Hopkinson 2007: 17).

Clearly enough, the first subcategory, lexical generalisation: false cognates,

generates mistakes similar to surface lexical interference, as denominated by

Thorovský. Hopkinson gives examples such as největší kulturní dům v

republice – *the biggest House of Culture in the republic (the biggest cultural

centre in the country). Generalisation in word-formation designates incorrect

translations of, mostly, suffixes or literal translations of word forms from Czech

into English. Hopkinson gives examples such as energetika – *energetics

(energy industry), anglistika – *anglistics (English studies), etc.

The last factor generating interference is called systemic and structural

differences between Czech and English. This factor produces interference on

higher levels, i.e. “on the morphological, syntactic and grammatical levels of the

IL [interlanguage]” (Hopkinson 2007: 18). First, the differences in morphological

systems cause interferences on the level of literal translation of parts of speech.

Hopkinson gives examples such as pochování Bakuse do hrobu ve sněhu [...]

– *burying of Bakus into the grave in snow [...] (the burial of Bacchus in the

snow [...]), Městské muzeum – *the municipal museum (the City Museum).

Second, differences in syntactic systems cause that translators frequently

literally translate the syntactic structure of the source text and preserve the word

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order in the target. As a result, the translated sentence sounds clumsy,

sometimes it is even ungrammatical and the original emphasis is usually shifted

to another element in the syntactic structure (due to differences in FSP). As one

of the examples, Hopkinson mentions the following translation: více o bohaté

historii kladenského průmyslu najdete na straně 10 – *more about the rich

history of Kladno industry you will find on page 10 (you will find more about the

rich history of Kladno’s industry on page 10). And third, Hopkinson presents

interferences caused by differences in grammatical systems. He says that

especially problematic seem nominal forms and genitive structures (in case of

translations from Czech into English), which the subjects usually tend to

translate using the preposition of. Hopkinson provides concrete examples of this

occurrence: sdružení, které rozvíjí své aktivity v oblasti cestovního ruchu –

*an association operating in the field of tourism (an association working in the

travel industry), [...] byla posledním místem pobytu lidických žen – *[...] was the

last place of stay for Lidice women ([...] was the last place where the women of

Lidice stayed).

As Hopkinson states in the conclusion to his paper, “this brief survey of

selected factors in linguistic interference does not claim to be complete; it does,

however, highlight the interdisciplinary approach which is required when

researching issues of interlanguage and interference” (Hopkinson 2007: 22).

Although Hopkinson does not come up with a classification of the types of

interferences, his study is valuable for our research. It reveals some of the

causes of interference which can help us to facilitate the classification.

Moreover, it is definitely helpful to know the source of interference because it

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enables the translator to analyse where the problem originated and what he/she

should be careful of.

3.3. Brenda Malkiel’s Research into Interference

Brenda Malkiel‟s corpus consists of students‟ translations from Hebrew into

English. Nine of the students were native speakers of English (translating into

their L1) and thirteen students were native speakers of Hebrew (translating into

their L2). She studies the role of directionality as far as interference is

concerned and she focuses on the students‟ on their way towards proficiency.

Malkiel takes notice of their progress in a three-semester time period. She says

that her “study examines the effect of training and experience on product and

process, asking whether translation students become better able to withstand

interference and whether the task becomes less difficult with time” (Malkiel

2006: 338). Brenda Malkiel takes advantage of Translog to analyse the data

collected and to see the students‟ progress. The two main forms of interference

which interest her most concern failure to lexicalize and false cognates. In other

words, Malkiel deals with interference only on the level of words. Lexicalizable

strings, as Malkiel terms this concept, are similar to what Thorovský calls

interference in collocation and semantic interference. In other words, it is the

case of a concept lexicalized in the source language but not in the target, or

vice versa. If the concept can be expressed using a single word in the SL but

there is no adequate single-word equivalent in the TL, the translator has to

express such a concept using a lexicalizable string. On the other hand, if some

concept is expressed by a string of words in the SL, but it has a suitable one-

word expression in the TL, the translator should use it. According to

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Hopkinson‟s claim, the factor causing this type of interference would probably

be exact syntactic equivalence in lexical interference. The second type of

interference investigated in Malkiel‟s paper is the occurrence of false cognates.

Unfortunately, we will not provide concrete examples from Brenda Malkiel‟s

research because she examines translations from Hebrew. Moreover, instances

of both of these types of interference have virtually been mentioned in the

previous chapters. Comparing these two types of interference in students‟

translations, Malkiel expresses an important statement: “Whereas there is some

debate as to whether failure to lexicalize constitutes an actual mistake, the

consensus is that it is incorrect to translate a false cognate by sound rather than

by meaning” (Malkiel 2006: 340). Malkiel also inquires into the question of

students‟ awareness of the difficulty of a text for translation and of potential

problems that may arise. She obtained the answers concerning this issue from

questionnaires which she distributed after the students had completed the first

translation task.

As far as the results from Malkiel‟s research are concerned, “as predicted,

performance on the lexicalizable strings and the false cognates significantly

improved between administrations for both the native English and the native

Hebrew speakers” (Malkiel 2006: 354). The study revealed that the students

became aware of possible interferences and they confirmed this fact in their

questionnaires. The improvement was evident; nevertheless, this did not mean

that interference disappeared completely from their translations. Brenda Malkiel

confirmed the claim that the amount of interference was dependent on the

professional experience of a translator and the quality of translations (from the

point of view of interferences occurring in target texts) could be improved by

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training. Results regarding directionality show that “translation students

translating into L1 are better able to avoid interference than their classmates

working into L2” (Malkiel 2006: 356). This result only verified the universally

assumed hypothesis.

To conclude, Brenda Malkiel studies interference in students‟ translations

over a longer period of time and thus inquires into the question of experience in

relation to the occurrence of interference in final products.

3.4. Research into Interference in Scientific and Technical Translation

by Javier Franco Aixelá

And the last person researching interference I would like to mention in this

chapter is Javier Franco Aixelá, a Spanish translation teacher who specializes

in technical translations. In his article, “An Overview of Interference in Scientific

and Technical Translation”, Javier Franco Aixelá states that interference can be

classified according to the following four types:

- lexical interference

- syntactic interference

- cultural interference, proper nouns included

- structural or pragmatic interference

He claims that the definition of interference “includes the importation,

whether intentional or not, of literal or modified foreign words and phrases

(lexical interference), forms (syntactic interference), specific cultural items

(cultural interference, proper nouns included), or genre conventions (structural

or pragmatic interference)” (Franco Aixelá 2009: 75). There is a slight difference

36

between his view of interference and the one of, for example, Thorovský. While

Thorovský states that interference is “an unintentional transfer of some

elements of the source language (SL) to the target language (TL)” (Thorovský

2009: 86), Aixelá admits that its manifestation may sometimes seem as

intentional concept (but he suggests that this view rather refers to the more

“ancient” perspectives concerning mainly translations of literary and religious

texts). From the point of view that interferences might occur intentionally, this

definition approximates the concepts of translationality and foreignization

mentioned above. Among other things, he adopts the diachronic point of view in

relation to interference. He considers perspectives of different people in

different historical periods and examines how the view of literal translations and

foreign elements present in the target texts changed (from word for word

translations to sense for sense translations). He refers to the fact that there are

even advocates of interference and “Bible translation is a clear example of this

and the reason why defender of sense for sense translation such as Jerome

(405) says that in the Bible even the order of the words is sacred and should be

respected” (Franco Aixelá 2009: 76). Nonetheless, he states that technical

translations are excluded from this view “since these kinds of texts are

somehow seen as international or culturally neutral” (Franco Aixelá 2009: 77).

In other words, “in technical prose, almost everybody seems to agree to a

lesser or greater extent that normalisation is a very good thing and interference

is essentially evil” (Franco Aixelá 2009: 78).

Anyway, interference frequently occurs in technical and scientific

translations and Javier Franco Aixelá mentions four motives for interference in

target texts: “the double tension intrinsically associated with translation, the

37

creation and preservation of specific terminology or jargon, the non-existence of

a given term or structure in TL, and the prestige of the source culture” (Franco

Aixelá 2009: 79). The last point advocates the above mentioned Toury‟s claim

that interferences tend to be more tolerated in translations from a prestigious SL

cultural background (Baker 2009: 307). In connection with this fact, Javier

Franco Aixelá mentions one interesting view of interference occurring in

technical translations. Regarding adaptation of foreign terminology, he says that

English terms are usually tolerated by experts and scientists because

specialised articles written in English serve them as a source of knowledge and

they accept English scientific texts as prestigious in this respect. “How often are

novice translators surprised, perhaps even shocked at the reaction of subject

specialist who re-translate certain passage of a nicely TL-worded text because

they insist on terms and phrases that the TL-conscious translator had expressly

eliminated” (Franco Aixelá 2009: 82). Indeed, this fact presents problems for

translators because they are faced with a difficult decision – whether they

should choose to adhere to prescriptivist or descriptivist point of view.

“Descriptivists think that translators should adapt to their readers‟ usage, even if this is not very logical or may be questionable for any other reason. Prescriptivists, on the other hand, think that the most correct term from the point of view of absolute respect to TL traditional patterns should always be promoted, even if this means swimming against the tide” (Franco Aixelá 2009: 83).

Aixelá summarizes this question by saying that technical and scientific articles

are, in this respect, very specific texts for translation. The translator has to

adapt to the norms and expectations of the target readership and to use such

terms which, according to the translator‟s linguistic knowledge, might not be

38

perfectly appropriate in the TL context as such but which are commonly used in

the context of technical and scientific language.

To conclude, Javier Franco Aixelá examines interference in a very specific

context and analyses interference mainly on the level of terminology taken from

another language (from English). He does not provide concrete examples, but

he rather writes about the nature of interference in specialised translations and

tries to answer the question what are the motives for interference in this type of

texts.

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4. ANALYSIS

This chapter will be devoted to the research and analysis of the corpus. The

research consists of three major parts: the corpus analysis with classification of

interference according to the types outlined in chapter 4.2., the interference

identification task (students and teachers were supposed to mark interferences

in one of the translations from the corpus) and the questionnaire concerning

students‟ awareness of interference. As far as the concrete outline of this

chapter is concerned, first, the corpus containing texts for analysis and the

method of research will be presented, and second, the types of interference,

according to which the examples from the corpus are classified, will be defined.

The concrete results of the analysis will be discussed later in chapter 5; and

answers from the questionnaires, given to the students of translation, and

results from the task mentioned above will be summarized in chapter 6.

As we have already mentioned in the chapter concerning Levý‟s concept,

there are two types of interference – direct and indirect. To make this clear, in

this research, we will analyse direct interference, i.e. direct influence from the

source text. Interference, in some cases, can be detected even without looking

at the original text, just by reading the final product. The passage, in which

interference occurs, sounds rather unnatural and the influence from English is

sometimes evident even without knowing the original text. Nevertheless, in this

research, interferences will be assessed in parallel with the source text. As we

will see on the actual examples, the seriousness of a mistake caused by

interference can be diverse – from “mistakes” which cause that the text is

clumsy, but which preserve the meaning of the original, to errors which

completely change the sense of the source text. An expression, a phrase or a

40

sentence is translated literally without considering the meaning of the context

and the original idea is thus changed. This is just to explain what the character

of mistakes caused by interference may be.

This research uses the descriptive approach to: we do not want to “criticize

bad translations” but to explore this phenomenon in students‟ translations; to

see how it manifests in their works, offer a list of possible classifications of

interferential types and to analyse their frequency. Moreover, we will focus on

students‟ perception of interference and their attitude towards it.

4.1. Corpus and Method

The corpus consists of assignments done by students of translation. In other

words, we will focus on the frequency of occurrence of interference in

translations of the trainees during their progress towards proficiency. All of the

students are of Czech nationality (i.e. Czech is their mother tongue) and study

English as a foreign language. The materials for the corpus are taken from two

courses (“Cultivating Translation Skills” and “Text and Discourse Analysis”)

designed primarily for people studying Master‟s Degree in Translation at the

Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. Both courses are dealing with L1

translation, which means translation into the students‟ mother tongue (from

English into Czech). This direction is considered the “more natural” process,

compared to L2 translation; despite this fact, interference is quite frequent in

students‟ translations. As far as the analysed texts are concerned, we will be

dealing exclusively with non-literary translations. The corpus consists of six

texts which were assigned to the students for translation in the two courses as

weekly homework. Three of the texts served as assignments in the course

41

“Cultivating Translation Skills” and the other three translations were from the

course entitled “Text and Discourse Analysis”. Altogether, the texts for

translation contained 3,285 words (19,731 characters). We have analysed 77

translations. The number of students translating individual texts was different for

each translation and the following table shows the concrete figures.

Text A Text B Text C Text D Text E Text F

Number of students 11 21 10 10 8 17

Table 1: Number of students translating individual texts

As far as the concrete types of texts are concerned, text A is a passage

taken from a science magazine article dealing with conservation in New

Zealand, text B is a journal article focusing on theories of anthropomorphism in

design, text C is an internet discussion of two Japanese scientists dealing with

robotics, text D is a chapter (Separation Anxiety and the Need to Cry) from a

book called “Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves” by Naomi Aldort

(focusing on parent-child relationships), text E is an article written on the

occasion of the death of Robert Holdstock, an English fantasy author. It was

called In Praise of Robert Holdstock and it was published on the guardian.co.uk.

And, finally, text F is a passage from Anthony Pym‟s book “Method in

Translation History”, dealing with getting funding for a research project and

writing research proposals.

Concerning the method of analysis and the concrete work with the corpus,

we will analyse translations done by individual people, mark interferences

occurring in each, classify them according to the type and summarize them in

terms of frequency of particular interferential types. Some of the students‟

42

names repeat and we will observe their individual results and their tendencies.

Nevertheless, we will deal with their assignments anonymously (we will

preserve only the students‟ initials). Of course, analysing translations from the

point of view of a concrete person‟s progress is also possible and it would be

interesting to see how interference changes in time (e.g. concentrate on a given

group of students, their translations during several semesters or throughout

their studies, and evaluate it from this point of view); but, for such a research a

rather long time-span would be needed so we will look at interference from a

rather more general perspective and focus on the types of it. Nevertheless, the

method mentioned could serve as a suggestion for a future research topic. To

specify the method once again, we will deal with the students‟ translations

anonymously; in other words, we will put the development of concrete people

aside and we will evaluate the issue of interference rather generally as a

problem which persists in students‟ translations and which can be eliminated by

training and gaining experience. We are looking at how interference manifests

in their translations. It will be interesting to see which type of interference occurs

with the greatest frequency, whether the style of a source text affects the

occurrence of interference and whether some of the students manifest personal

inclinations to one of the types. When we will find out what level causes

students the biggest problems, it will be possible to give them advice and to

warn them against concrete features.

As far as the actual corpus analysis is concerned, we collected the

translations and assessed them in terms of interference. The main criteria for

identifying interferences are the following: either the text sounds unnatural (as

has already been mentioned above, this feature very often serves as a marker

43

of interference) and we sometimes recognize interference even without reading

the source text, or the text is incomprehensible and the meaning is

inappropriate due to literal translation. We then marked places where

interference occurred and put these examples into a table (see the enclosed

CD) showing the TT passage on the left and the corresponding ST on the right;

which means that we worked with the texts (STs and TTs) in parallel. Finally,

these instances have been classified according to the types of interference

specified in the following chapter.

4.2. Classification of Interference for the Purpose of this Research

This chapter is focused on the classification of interference as we have

determined it for the purpose of the analysis. Each of the following subchapters

defines a particular type of interference, describes its characteristics and gives

several examples from the corpus. The classes are the following: Lexical,

Syntactic and Grammatical interference, Borderline cases, Typographical

interference and the group entitled Miscellaneous. Of course, the classifications

and factors presented by the four scholars mentioned above served as a source

of inspiration for this classification.

4.2.1. Lexical Interference

Lexical interference occurs on the level of words. It includes mainly

interferences caused by incorrect or inappropriate direct translation of a

concept. Lexical interference includes four types of occurrence. What first

comes to everyone‟s mind when thinking about lexical interference are probably

false friends (also called false cognates or faux amis). Virtually, all of the

44

researchers and scholars mentioned in chapter 3 dealt with this type because it

is one of the most evident lexical interferences. The second type of lexical

interference consists in mistakes which very often arise because the students

fail to consider the polysemous character of a word and their choice from all the

possible meanings is inappropriate. The third lexical feature which causes

interferences on this level is the lack of ability to express a concept using more

words in the target when necessary (lexicalizable strings as denominated by

Brenda Malkiel). And the last subcategory of lexical interference is the case of a

literal translation of an idiom or a collocation. Just to make this clear, this

typology has been developed during the actual analyses of the texts and it has

been created according to the concrete examples which appeared in the

corpus. Of course, the classifications presented in chapter 3 served as a basis

for this typology. In the following paragraphs, these types will be described and

we will give several examples of each.

In short, false friends are words which have a similar form in the two

languages but their meaning is not always the same, in other words, they

cannot be translated by sound. Kussmaul confirms this by saying that “notorious

candidates for causing this type of error are „false friends‟” (Kussmaul 1995:15)

and particularly false friends are the elements which, according to him, cause

serious mistakes in translations. Brenda Malkiel says that false friends are “a

recurrent source of word-level interference” (Malkiel 2006: 340). When a literally

translated false friend occurs in a translation, especially in cases of less

experienced translators, it is likely that the subject did not recognize it at first

sight and, thus, translated it subconsciously using a formally similar word.

Kussmaul works with TAP protocols and confirms this claim: “Interferences of

45

this type arise spontaneously and without any comment, which shows that the

problem was not realized at all” (Kussmaul 1995: 16). It is obvious that

translating a potential false friend requires conscious reflection and translators

need to make sure what the correct equivalent in the target language is.

Nevertheless, Kussmaul states that the fear of interference is sometimes

exaggerated and more experienced translators become increasingly afraid of

literal translation of formally similar words. He adds that “there are two types [of

formally corresponding words]: those which always turn out to be false friends,

and those which can sometimes be good friends” (Kussmaul 1995: 15). As has

already been mentioned above, when coming across a “good friend”, translators

sometimes automatically translate it by another expression to avoid potential

error. They decide so without considering the meaning of such a word in the

given context because this choice is considered as a safer solution.

“These words are problems even when translators have already switched to reflection, for they have to decide if the formally corresponding word is the correct translation or if they must look for a formally non-corresponding expression, a decision which sometimes requires a detailed semantic analysis of the context. Semantically speaking, the problem is caused by polysemy. One of the meanings of these words, but not all, can be translated by formally corresponding TL-word.” (Kussmaul 1995: 16)

In the corpus, I did not find many examples of this phenomenon because not

many good friends actually appeared there. Nevertheless, I have come across

two examples of good friends in the source texts but “the safer solution” was

incorrect, in this case. One student wanted to avoid the formally equivalent

translation of collateral damage because she probably felt that a problem could

occur. She decided to use the Czech expression přídružné škody although

kolaterální škody would be more appropriate. She thought that she chose the

46

safer path but her solution was inappropriate, indeed. A similar example

occurred in the expression fantasy author translated as spisovatel fantasy

literatury. For some reason, the student used a formally non-equivalent word

although autor fantasy would sound much better.

The following table shows at least some examples of literal translations of

false friends from the corpus:

Source text Incorrect translation Correct translation

pest control * kontrola škůdců hubení / boj proti škůdcům

panel * panel komise / odborníci

produce eggs * produkovat vejce snést vajíčka Consciousness is a difficult subject

Vědomí je složitý *subjekt Vědomí je složité téma

Information & Training Center

informační a *tréninkové centrum

informační a školicí centrum

Table 2: Lexical Interference: False Friends

Another feature causing lexical interference is the inappropriate translation

of a concept due to the fact that translators rely on one of the first meanings

from a dictionary or on their own current knowledge. “Learners of foreign

language and translators are often not aware of the fact that words might have

more meanings than the meaning they know” (Kussmaul 1995: 20). They

subconsciously recollect the meaning they know and do not consider the

context of it. According to Hopkinson‟s division of the key factors in interference,

this mistake is caused by inadequate use of reference materials (Hopkinson

2007). Mostly it concerns inadequate work with dictionaries and corpora. As a

result, the translation is inappropriate in the given context. It is essential to read

the whole context in which such a word appears first, consider the meaning of

the sentence and, thus, the meaning of the word in the actual segment. It is

* The asterisks indicate examples identified as interferences.

47

advisable to consult several sources and not to build exclusively on bilingual

dictionaries or on one‟s knowledge. Monolingual dictionaries will give the

subjects the general idea of the concept and they will not stick to certain word

provided in an English-Czech dictionary. Another piece of advice, in such

cases, is to use corpora; they will reveal the meaning of a word in context and a

translator can draw on real occurrences. The word from the source text can

have a completely different meaning in the target and needs to be expressed

more freely depending on the actual context. In case of the occurrence of

special terminology or jargon, translators have to conduct research concerning

the language of the concrete group of people and should translate a word using

an established term. Although not many specialized terms actually appear in the

texts from the corpus, the sentence from text A contains examples of similar

features:

In pest control they are non-target species. – Při regulaci škůdců se zase řeší problém úhynu *necílených druhů. (necílových druhů)

Subjects also very often “trust their knowledge”; even basic vocabulary can

have a very different meaning in a specific context and students hardly ever

notice this fact. To give an example of such a mistake, one student translated

chicks as *kuřata. To supply the whole context, it appeared in the following

sentence:

Some birds, experienced breeders, may yet produce eggs and chicks […] – Někteří zkušenější ptačí rodičové přesto dovedou přivést na svět vajíčka a vysedět z nich *kuřata […].

The student relied on her knowledge and failed to consider the fact that such a

translation is inappropriate in the given context.

* The asterisks indicate examples identified as interferences. The correct translation is in the parentheses.

48

To summarize the concept, this type of interference is caused by the fact

that students subconsciously apply one of the meanings which they store in

their mental lexicon although it does not fit the given context. They do not

consider the fact that lots of words are polysemous. Sense, in other words, is

determined primarily by the linguistic situation. “The learner of a foreign

language has internalized the most common and frequent meaning of a word

but not all of its potential meanings. Very often these “unknown” meanings are

figurative ones” (Kussmaul 1995: 21). The following table contains examples of

lexical interference which occurred because the students did not consider the

sense of a word in the actual context:

Source text Incorrect translation Correct translation

non-target species * necílené druhy necílové druhy

wild animals * divoká zvířata divoce / volně žijící zvířata

Images from the Graf brothers‟ latest film

* Obrázky z nejnovějšího

filmu Záběry z nejnovějšího filmu

a suite of foils * sada fólií řada metod (jak zabránit) / léček

chicks * kuřata mláďata / ptáčata

robot arms robotické *zbraně robotická ramena Table 3: Lexical Interference: literal translations of words

Another interferential feature which very often occurs in students‟

translations is the situation in which a certain concept from the source text

needs to be expressed by several words in the target text (lexicalizable strings

as denominated by Brenda Malkiel). The TL either completely lacks a single-

word equivalent or the concept simply needs to be specified in more words

because the sense of a one-word translation would be inappropriate or

insufficient. One such example (from text D) follows:

If she feels safe to express herself, she will create the circumstances in which to vent old hurts. Later in this chapter you will find an example of a child “processing past hurts”. – Pokud se cítí připraveno se vyjádřit, vytvoří si samo

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okolnosti, za nichž bude moci své *bolístky z minulosti ventilovat. Později v této kapitole naleznete příklad toho, jak dítě "3minulé *bolístky zpracovává." It is essential to express this concept using more words in Czech; probably

even reformulate the idea in an additional clause. Although, the translation is

not the worst solution, the student evidently tried to find a one-word expression

among the most common meanings of the given word. Students very often

make a mistake because they do not even consider the possibility that the

original expression can have two- or more-word referent in the target language.

All in all, lexical interferences of this kind may result in misunderstanding of

the concept and the translation becomes unintelligible for the readership. The

translator‟s task is to mediate a text to the target readership and to produce an

accurate translation. A translation should not contain misunderstandings caused

by interference or incomprehensible structures which the reader would have to

decipher. As Javier Franco Aixelá says: “receivers do not like having to make

an additional reading effort to understand and cope with texts bearing many

lexical and stylistic instances that run contrariwise to what is considered to be

optimum according to the conventions for that text type in the TL” (Franco

Aixelá 2009: 77). Some examples from the corpus are listed in the following

table:

Source text Incorrect translation Correct translation

hurts * bolístky způsobené křivdy / bolestné zkušenosti

read this manga in real time

četla tento specifický japonský kreslený komiks *v reálném čase

bezprostředně po jeho vzniku / v době, kdy vycházel

masterpiece * veledílo mistrovské dílo Table 4: Lexical Interference – lexicalizable strings

As suggested by Brenda Malkiel, the opposite concept to this one is the

situation when translators fail to lexicalize (Malkiel 2006). Nevertheless, the

3 Interference in typography

50

source texts included in the corpus do not actually contain many occasions to

study this phenomenon and I have not found a clear example of this type.

Malkiel gives several examples of literally translated strings from Hebrew. For

example, instead of using the English one-word expression deadlines, the

subject translated the Hebrew string directly as times for submission and

completion (Malkiel 2006: 344).

And the last example of lexical interference is direct translation of idioms

and, sometimes, collocations. Even though, this group partially overlaps with

syntactic interference – it consists in translating a sequence of words literally – I

will include this feature here because the problem lies mainly in mistranslation

of the sense; i.e. the interference occurs on the semantic level. Indeed, the

source texts from the corpus do not contain many idioms so the occurrence of

such interference is very rare.

Source text Incorrect translation Correct translation

breeding burns a lot of fuel

páření *„spálí mnoho paliva”

páření si žádá hodně energie

need not involve selling your soul

neznamená *prodat svou duši

neznamená zaprodat svou duši

Table 5: Lexical Interference – idioms, collocations

To conclude, lexical interferences include mistranslations due to a literal

translation of a word, an expression or an idiom. The main criterion for

identification of an interference as a lexical one is that the chosen word does

not fit the context or there is a shift in the semantic meaning in the target text.

The students very often apply one of the most frequent meanings of a word and

fail to consider its occurrence in the given text. Besides the fact that lexical

interference affects the quality of a translation, it can very often cause quite

serious mistakes.

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4.2.2. Syntactic Interference

Syntactic interference, as the title suggests, occurs on the level above the

word, i.e. on the level of syntax. It includes literal translation of a syntactic

structure, either the whole sentence or a certain part of it. The sequence of

words from the original text is preserved even in the target text in which the

sentence is clumsy, sounds unnatural or weird. The subject translates the

segment word for word, focuses on the translation of individual units rather than

on the sentence as a whole, and fails to consider the sense of the given

segment. Meaning of a text does not consist only in the sense of its individual

parts but in the sense of the structure as a whole; its composition participates in

the meaning and, thus – because of the differences between English and Czech

syntax – it cannot always be translated literally. To give a concrete example of

such differences, Czech and English have distinct preferences in terms of

Functional Sentence Perspective. Therefore, one of the problems which can

arise is that if a sentence is translated literally into Czech, the emphasis

expressed in the source text may lose its effect in the target. Kufnerová

mentions syntactic differences between languages and she states that quite a

considerable amount of interferences occur because translators fail to consider

the fact that, in Czech, unlike in English, the new information (rheme, i.e. the

most important element) is placed at the end of a sentence (Kufnerová 2009:

46). In English, the information which stands at the beginning of a segment

possesses more emphasis.

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[...] to learn over the weekend that fantasy author Robert Holdstock has died, aged just 61. – Když jsem se dozvěděl, že spisovatel4 fantasy literatury Robert Holdstock zemřel ve věku pouhých 61 let, [...].

In this example, Robert Holdstock is the most important element of the

sentence and deserves to be shifted to the final position in Czech. The

sentence would sound much more natural when transformed in this way:

Když jsem se dozvěděl, že ve věku pouhých 61 let zemřel autor fantasy literatury Robert Holdstock, [...]. A similar example of this type of syntactic interference occurs in the following

sentence:

In short, we will be studying humans through robots. – Vezmu-li to zkrátka, budeme studovat člověka prostřednictvím robotů.

To propose a better solution of this sentence, it would be correct to swap the

two elements in the Czech sentence:

Vezmu-li to zkrátka, prostřednictvím robotů budeme studovat člověka.

As far as these two examples are concerned, in English, the word order is

given and cannot be changed; but, in Czech it is necessary to shift the rheme of

the original sentence to the end in the target. There are several examples of a

similar literal syntactic translation in the texts from the corpus. As a result of

such a direct translation, a sentence or an expression either sounds clumsy in

Czech or there may even be a slight shift of meaning – e.g. a certain element,

which is emphasized in the original, lost its importance in the translation.

Kufnerová moreover adds that translators very often literally imitate the

English word order. Of course, in most cases, this is not an explicit mistake but

rather a stylistic ineptitude (Kufnerová 2009: 46-47). Czech, unlike English, is a

4 Lexical interference: fantasy author translated as spisovatel fantasy literatury.

53

synthetic language and thanks to this has a largely flexible word order.

Translators should take advantage of this fact and transform a sentence or an

expression so that it sounded as if it was originally written in Czech rather than

as a direct translation from English. “A translation should be the same as the

source text but should not sound as if it was the source text” (Franco Aixelá

2009: 76). Sentences literally transferred into Czech at first sight reveal that a

text is a translation.

“Whereas Czech is a broadly synthetic language and thus has a highly complex and largely unambiguous system of inflection, in English inflection is residual. One obvious consequence of the Czech system of inflection is the language‟s tendency to exhibit relatively free word order (carrying out a semantic function), in contrast to the fixed word order of English, which fulfils a grammatical function” (Hopkinson 2007: 20).

The interferences, which have been marked as syntactic ones in the

analysis, are those which consist of a sequence of words directly translated into

Czech. The length of such sequences differs – from expressions containing

several words to whole sentences. These formulations either sound unnatural in

Czech – and compared with the source text their syntactic structure is the same

– or as a result of such a literal transformation, the meaning is shifted. To

illustrate what a syntactic interference can cause, the following sentence shows

one of the cases in which a direct translation of the structure caused a serious

shift in the meaning and the sentence was thus misunderstood.

According to the comfort thesis anthropomorphism is “an attempt to feel like we can define and influence the world if it is more like us than not.” – Podle teorie o jistotách se pomocí antropomorfizace snažíme dosáhnout pocitu, že budeme snáze *moci určovat a ovlivňovat svět, když nám bude podobný, než kdyby nám podobný nebyl.

54

And the last thing to be mentioned concerns the criterion for marking

syntactic interferences. It is sometimes very difficult to decide whether the

wording of a sentence is already perceived as unnatural or whether it is still

tolerable in Czech. I decided to mark the cases in which the structure was

evidently influenced by the source-text formulation and which sounded weird in

Czech. Basically two types of manifestation can occur: the sentence is either

word for word translation of all the elements in the sequence (the following

examples A), or the structure of the original is preserved but some words (very

often prepositions, pronouns or other components) are omitted, added or

changed, i.e., the translation is literal in the sense of the order of the information

but not in terms of the literal translation of all the elements from the source text

(examples B).

Examples A: […] the modern characters, weary and wounded from a technological global conflict […] – […] moderní postavy, unavené a raněné z technologického globálního konfliktu […] Later in this chapter you will find an example of a child “processing past hurts”. – Níže v této kapitole najdete příklad dítěte „zpracovávajícího prožitou bolest“.

Examples B: Mythago Wood was one of those books that has stayed with me, emotionally and physically – Les mytág je jednou z knih, které se mnou stále zůstávají, emocionálně i fyzicky. Even if we know about a past pain that could use healing, as my friend suggested, there is no purpose in staging opportunities for a child to cry. – I kdybychom věděli o nějaké minulé bolesti, kterou je potřeba léčit, jak naznačil můj kamarád, není žádný důvod k vystavování dítěte příležitosti plakat. For Japanese researchers, this quest leads inevitably to exploring what humans are through robots, and that is also what fascinates me most. – Japonské vědce tento úkol nevyhnutelně přivedl ke zkoumání lidské podstaty skrze robotiku, a právě to mě nejvíce zaujalo.

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Syntactic interference is quite frequent in students‟ translations and it is

probably most difficult to avoid particularly this type. Students have to

disengage from the wording of the original, to a certain extent, and to learn to

reformulate the sentences fluently in Czech. It requires a lot of training and

experience.

4.2.3. Grammatical Interference

Grammatical interference occurs in cases in which the subject ignores the

grammatical differences between the two languages or gets influenced by the

English norms. This type of interference is often obvious at first sight because

the elements translated literally from English deviate from the Czech

grammatical system. Probably, one of the most frequent examples which

occurred in the corpus was literal translation of personal and demonstrative

pronouns. Some of these are included in the following table:

Source text Grammatical interference

[...] why I was taking my toddler with me on a speaking engagement [...]

[...] proč s sebou do práce tahám moje batole.

[...] I returned again and again to that feeling the book gave me when I first read it: that strange mix of the magical and the commonplace [...]

[...] jsem si pořád přehrával ten pocit, který ve mně poprvé zanechala: tu zvláštní směsici tajemna a všednosti [...]

[...] which we have translated to the social thesis.

[...] který jsme my změnili na sociální teorii.

That‟s because these kamahi trees [...]

To proto, že tyto stromy kamahi [...]

Table 6: Grammatical Interference

English uses demonstratives or other determinants much more than Czech

does. Students very often directly translate such elements although they are

redundant in the target text. In the first example included in the table, the

student was influenced by the source text to the extent that she even committed

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a blunder; in Czech, the grammatically correct translation would sound: [...] proč

s sebou do práce tahám své batole.

Other examples included in this type of interference are literal translations of

auxiliary verbs, direct translation of parts of speech (involves mainly

nominalization), grammatical differences concerning the integrity of an

expression (cases in which an expression is perfectly comprehensible in

English but, in Czech, it is necessary to insert some element to make it

grammatically correct) and preferences in the position of certain elements. The

following table provides concrete examples of these interferences:

Source text Incorrect translation Correct translation

Possums can be promiscuous

Kusu mohou být promiskuitní

Kusu jsou/bývají promiskuitní

It may even be possible to induce

Dokonce by bylo možné ovlivnit

Mohla by dokonce existovat i možnost

the art of getting funding. kterým je umění získání finančních prostředků.

umění získat

However, understanding these social theories of anthropomorphism provides insight to our discussion

Porozumění těmto společenským teoriím antropomorfismu však umožňuje pochopení naší diskuse

umožňuje pochopit

Reaching out for a coffee cup, bringing it up to the mouth, having a sip, and smelling and tasting it.

Sáhnutí po šálku s kávou, jeho přemístění k ústům, usrknutí doušku, vnímání vůně a chuti.

Natáhnout se pro hrnek s kávou, zvednout ho k ústům, dát si doušek, přivonět a ochutnat.

he would feel scared and desperate

cítilo by se vystrašeně a zoufale

byl by vystrašený a zoufalý

unknown number of insects

neznámého množství hmyzu

Neznámého počtu druhů hmyzu

They [baby possums] have few digits […]

Mají [mláďata vačic] málo prstů […]

Mláďata se rodí pouze s několika prsty

ZP proteins ZP proteiny proteiny ZP

a devastated kamahi forest

zdevastovaného kamahi lesa

les kamahi

Table 7: Grammatical Interference

Under the group of grammatical interferences, we understand direct

translations of grammatical features typical of the source language but

inexistent or untypical in the target language. Sometimes, it may happen that a

57

sentence is translated word for word and simultaneously some part of the

segment results to be ungrammatical due to literal translation. In such cases,

the higher level is preferred and these examples have been marked as syntactic

interferences. Moreover, the reason why we decided to include these cases into

syntactic interference is that the structure contains more constituents of a

sentence. This concerns also the following example:

According to the comfort thesis anthropomorphism is “an attempt to feel like we can define and influence the world if it is more like us than not.” – Antropomorfismus je podle této teorie „pokus o to, cítit se jako my definuje a ovlivňuje svět, jestliže nám je více podobný nežli naopak.“

This sentence is an extreme example of such a case; but, similar instances,

although not so evident, occurred in other translations and they have been

classified as syntactic interferences.

Grammatical interferences definitely should not appear in professional

translations because they (of course, just like the other types of interference)

indicate the poor quality of a target text. Compared with the two previously

discussed types, although grammatical interferences mostly do not cause

misunderstanding of the original meaning, they often immediately reveal that a

text is a translation. Yet, it seems that it is not so difficult (compared to lexical

and syntactic interference) to get rid of this type of interference – the mistakes

are often easily spotted so it sometimes would be sufficient to pay more

attention to the final reading of a translation. The students themselves would

certainly be able to avoid most of the interferences of this type.

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4.2.4. Borderline Cases

When the actual analysis was started, it turned out that a group containing

borderline cases of interference would be needed. Examples which are not, to

all intents and purposes, literal translations of the original but still some

influence is evident have been included in this group. Mostly, the students

realized that some problem occurred, they tried “to solve it somehow” but the

final solution was still imperfect. In other words, it concerns translations which

are not the “worst” possible interferences but the solution is only halfway to

perfection. In fact, these examples may sometimes overlap with indirect

interferences because although the translator is still influenced directly by the

source-text formulation, he/she already tries to do something with it within the

target language system. The main difference between this type and the

previous types of interferences is that the three groups mentioned above seem

to occur subconsciously; the subjects do not even realize that interference may

occur in a given passage. On the other hand, it is obvious that in the examples

pertaining to borderline cases, the students were fully conscious of a problem;

unfortunately, they failed to do the job properly.

To clarify what exactly is meant by this definition, e.g. the following

examples have been marked as borderline cases in the corpus:

[...] have powered the procreation [...] – [...] dávaly energii pro rozmnožování [...] [...] fled an aerial 1080 operation [...] – [...] uprchly […] před šířením látky 1080 vzduchem [...] [...] over the breeding season, which is triggered by shortening days [...] – [...] během doby páření, s počátkem v období, kdy se začínají krátit dny [...] As we make robots, we will actually be exploring [...] – Při výrobě robotů budeme totiž zkoumat [...]

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At times, the notion of releasing pain through tears can be taken too far. – Metoda vyplavování bolesti slzami může někdy zajít do extrému.

Borderline cases of interference, moreover, contain several instances of

names and terms which the students decided not to translate and left them in

English in their final versions. In a sense, this could be viewed as an example of

minimax strategy as defined by Jiří Levý: “the translator resolves for one of the

possible solutions which promise a maximum of effect with a minimum of effort.

That is to say, he intuitively resolves for the MINIMAX STRATEGY” (Baker

2001: 117). Nevertheless, in the cases included in this category, the translators

should mediate the information written in the original to the readership and

should not complicate the text by leaving certain elements (which can and

should be translated) in English. One of the students, for example, did not

translate the name of the book Mythago Wood, although it was translated into

Czech under the title Les Maytag. The second example was the name of a

theory called Species-Specific Group-Level Coordination System; several

students (3 out of 21) preserved the name in English without even explaining

the concept to the target readership. And the last example of such an

occurrence was the case in which a student decided to leave the name of an

architect qualification, Certified first-grade architect, because she felt it was a

problematic issue.

Some examples, for which it was difficult to decide whether it was an

interference or not, were the evident attempts of the students to find a feasible

translation in a dictionary; they evidently perceived that some of the most

common meanings were inappropriate for the context. They were looking for a

less common word but their final solution was inadequate. In a way, they were

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influenced by the source text in terms of their feeling that they needed to find a

feasible translation, i.e., a one-word corresponding concept. Even though, the

students were aware of the fact that the first apparent meaning which came to

their minds did not fit the context, they did not succeeded in finding the ideal

solution (in most cases, it was essential to express the concept in a different

way; for example, use more words to grasp the essence of an expression). The

following paragraph contains some examples of borderline cases.

[...] why they pursued this approach [...] – [...] proč si vybrali zrovna toto směřování [...] [...] explores the scientific and philosophical implications of this approach. – [...] se zabývá vědeckými a filozofickými důsledky této cesty. [...] links small questions to big questions [...] – [...] vede ke spojování malých věcí s velkými [...] Good mileage can be obtained from [...] – Sedmimílový krok lze učinit pomocí [...] [...] an inevitable part of our business. – [...] nedílné součásti každého našeho počínání.

These types of mistakes are, generally speaking, not caused by direct

interference; but, the primary influence of the source text is evident in the cases

included in this group. At first, I hesitated whether these should be counted

towards the total results, but, in the end, I did so because it will definitely be

interesting to see the actual numbers in proportion to the other types. In short,

borderline cases include examples in which the students evidently attempted to

avoid interference (they were probably conscious of it) but their influence by the

source text still can be felt in the target.

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4.2.5. Interference in Typography

Interference in typography differs quite considerably from the previously

mentioned types because it is not the truly linguistic issue; it has nothing to do

with the formulation of a sentence or translation of lexical units but it concerns

the formal rules and norms of the two languages in contact. Nevertheless, even

this aspect of translation will be explored because the formal appearance is an

essential part of translation and interferences on this level still persist among

students. This group of interference includes mainly punctuation and capital

letters. Very often the students ignore these differences and preserve the

typographical norms from the source text. Even though it is quite easy to avoid

this type of interference, students very often pay too much attention to the

lexical and syntactic level of a translation and forget about the formal aspect.

Certainly, this type of interference is a result of inattention and careless re-

readings of the final product.

The incorrect usage of punctuation represents the most typical occurrence

of this type of interference. Generally speaking, commas and quotation marks

are the most frequent examples in the corpus. When a comma appears in the

source text, students automatically tend to insert it also in the target text.

Moreover, during the analysis of the corpus, it has been realized that even the

opposite phenomenon occurred in the translations – sentences which do not

require a comma in English miss it even in Czech, where it is essential (e.g. [...]

to explain things we do not understand in terms that we do understand [...] – [...]

vysvětlit věci jimž nerozumíme způsobem pro nás pochopitelným.).

Nevertheless, we do not count these examples in the analysis because an

absence of a comma does not have to be caused strictly by interference.

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Here are at least some examples of typographical interferences from the

corpus:

His book “The Future Astroboy” [...] – Jeho kniha “Astrochlapec budoucnosti” [...] “[…] we usually lose little”. – „[…] obvykle toho moc neztratíme”. Of course, this is just a hypothesis. – Samozřejmě, to vše je jen má hypotéza. As we make robots, we will actually be exploring the mechanism [...] – Při výrobě robotů, budeme vlastně zkoumat mechanismy [...] [...] that would, in pre-pestilent times, have powered the procreation [...] – [...] které by, v době před těmito zhoubnými nájezdy, byly zásobami pro rozmnožování [...] United States – Spojené Státy New Zealand forest – Novozélandských lesů

Typographical interference definitely deserves more attention because, as

evident from the result of the research, students still make errors of this type.

Although it is a fundamental mistake, they probably focus more on the linguistic

level of translation and become easily influenced by the formal aspect of the

original text.

4.2.6. Miscellaneous

And the last category I have established for the purpose of this research is

the group concerning miscellaneous types of errors. At the beginning, I

expected that this group will contain all the “unclassifiable” interferences which

would not fit any of the groups defined above. Yet it sounds as a very vague

group, it has turned out that it contains quite specific types of interferences. The

only mistakes which “remained” unclassified were: the transcriptions of names

according to the Czech norm and the type of interference which could also be

63

designated as pragmatic interference. By the term pragmatic interference we

mean direct translation of cultural specific determinants. Basically, the examples

which occurred in the corpus concerned the possessive pronoun our literally

translated into Czech. The problem was that the students failed to realize the

pragmatic function of the text; they transferred the linguistic aspect of the text

but forgot for whom they were translating it.

[…] powered the procreation of our native wildlife. – […] k rozmnožování naší volně žijících fauny. […] templates for all the figures of our myths […] – […] se staly modelem všech postav našich mýtů […] The first example is taken from the text dealing with native wildlife in New

Zealand; and, in the second one, the pronoun our refers to British myths and

legends. It means that it cannot be translated literally because it does not fit the

context of the target cultural background; due to this element, the translation is

out of place.

The issue of proper names is the second type of occurrence which pertains

to this group. First, it concerns Czech norms of women‟s surnames, and

second, it includes the transcription of, in our case, Japanese names into

Czech. In Czech, the suffix –ová (most often) is added at the end of women‟s

surnames. As this does not apply to English, translators have to know the sex of

a person mentioned in the original text and transcribe the name according to the

norm mentioned. Nevertheless, students sometimes either decide to leave the

name as it is in English (the first example in the following paragraph) or they

often fail to carry out such a research and do not even realize that the people

are women (the second example).

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[...] Carol Craven told Danielle Yealands – […] Carol Craven, například oznámila své pacientce Danielle Yealands […] Caporarel and Heyes have put forth a theory of anthropomorphism […] – Caporarel a Heyes představili teorii antropomorfizace […]

The following examples show the second type of occurrence as far as the

norms of names transcription are concerned. All of these examples have been

found in text C, in the discussion of the two Japanese scientists dealing with

robotics.

A Dialogue between Nobukazu Tajika and Noboru Kobayashi – rozhovor Nobukazu Tajiky a Noboru Kobayashiho in Tokyo – v Tokyu in Toyama Prefecture – v prefektuře Toyama

According to the Czech norm, it would be correct to transcribe these names

phonologically; i.e., Nobukazu Tadžika, Noboru Kobajaši, Tokio and Tojama.

Eight out of ten people failed to transcribe the names of the two men and seven

out of ten did not transcribe one of the two toponyms.

To conclude, although this group of interference may sound vague, as an

“interference waste basket”, it turned out that only few very specific examples

fell into this group. This suggests that the groups presented above seem quite

comprehensive and sufficient for determining the types of interference.

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5. RESULTS FROM THE ANALYSIS

The actual results will be discussed in this chapter. We will look at the tables

summarizing quantitatively the occurrences of individual types of interference, in

individual texts and for individual students (see the tables in the Appendix). We

have also created separate tables summarizing interferences occurring in

translations of those students who have been translating three or more texts out

of the six5, to see whether any personal tendencies are exhibited by various

students, or whether their results correspond to the overall outcomes. In other

words, first, we will evaluate interference in general considering the results

regardless the occurrences for concrete students. From these results, we

should be able to answer the question whether the style of a text plays a key

role in the manifestation of interference. And then, we will look at the results of

different people, which should reveal whether interference is an individual-

dependent phenomenon. Moreover, we would like to get the answer as to

whether it is possible to clearly state that a student often has problems on a

certain level or whether this cannot be clearly expressed because the results

change according to the text.

5.1. Results Summarizing the Types of Interferences in Individual

Texts

The following graph represents the total values of individual types of

interference found in all of the texts from the corpus.

5 Two texts are not enough if we want to observe any tendencies in translations.

66

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

L e xical in te r fe r e n ce

Syn tactic in te r fe r e n ce

Gr am m atical

in te r fe r e n ce

Bo r d e r lin e cas e s

In te r fe r e n ce in

typ o g r ap h y

M is ce llan e o u s

Graph 1: Total values of individual types of interference

The most evident feature which first catches our attention when we look at

the total values is the fact that lexical and syntactic interferences are the most

frequent ones in the students‟ translations. The total value of lexical interference

outnumbers the syntactic (283 to 208); but, in two of the texts (text B and E),

syntactic interference was more frequent than the lexical one.

Lexical interference Syntactic interference

Text A (11) 53 32

Text B (21) 21 47

Text C (10) 56 48

Text D (10) 41 24

Text E (8) 17 25

Text F (17) 95 32

TOTAL 283 208 Table 8: Lexical and syntactic interference (The numbers in brackets stand for the number of students translating the text.)

An interesting finding is that text B contains only 21 lexical interferences,

although most people (21) translated this text. On the other hand, text F

(translated by 17 students) contains 95 lexical interferences. The style of the

text evidently plays an important role – in fact, text B does not contain many

false friends or “tricky” lexical elements so the precondition for the manifestation

of potential lexical interference is not so strong. On the other hand, the syntactic

formulations in this text caused troubles to the students and the passages in

which interference occurred were virtually the same in most of the translations.

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Obviously, the style of the original largely influences the resulting amount of

interferences in the target text. In contrast, text F is written in a different way

from the stylistic point of view. Anthony Pym has a specific style of writing and,

in this text, he utilizes irony and the words sometimes have a rather symbolic or

abstract meaning. The students, thus, very often failed to express the concept

correctly because they relied on the basic meaning.

In proportion to the other types, lexical interference forms 36% of all the

interferences occurring in the corpus and syntactic interference amounts to

27%.

Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases

Interf. in Typography

Miscellaneous

36% 27% 11% 8% 8% 11% Table 9: Proportions of individual types of interference

According to the overall results (table 9), the other four types of interference

are, more or less, at the same level. The actual occurrences in each text are

shown in the following table:

Grammatical Interference

Borderline cases

Interference in typography

Miscellaneous

Text A (11) 38 12 10 9

Text B (21) 10 7 17 33

Text C (10) 11 16 22 26

Text D (10) 9 5 3 0

Text E (8) 10 6 6 3

Text F (17) 4 15 1 13

TOTAL 82 61 59 84 Table 10: Grammatical interference, borderline cases, interference in typography and miscellaneous (The numbers in brackets stand for the number of students translating the text)

The occurrence of miscellaneous types and interference in typography is

considerably high in texts B and C. Definitely, in these cases, the text influenced

the results because it contained several occasions for interference of this type.

It is evident, though, that most of the students were unable to avoid such

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influence. We have already discussed the concrete instances in chapters 4.2.5

and 4.2.6, and we mentioned the fact that, for example, if a name or a

typographical feature appeared in the original, most of the students got easily

influenced by the source text aspect. In other words, to a certain degree, the

occurrence of these types of interference depends on the actual amount of

passages in the source text which provide an occasion for the manifestation of

such interferences in the target. On the other hand, text D does not contain any

example of miscellaneous types of interferences because neither names nor

cultural specific elements appear in the original text. And in text F, only one

instance of interference in typography was found (a dash remained in the

translation although it did not fit the structure).

An extremely high number of grammatical interferences has been found in

text A. If we look at the concrete examples, the passages in which grammatical

problems occur coincide in most of the students‟ translations. The source text

probably influenced the translator to such a degree that he/she caused

interference on this level and, obviously, most of the students did not even

realize that there was a problem in their translations. Text F, on the other hand,

does not seem to cause troubles for the students – only 4 grammatical

interferences occurred. In the other texts, grammatical interferences manifest

quite evenly; the average occurrence ranges from 0.5 to 1.3.

Although the main tendencies are obvious, the style of the concrete text

definitely influences the end result. Of course, it would be optimal to find six

texts which would be equal as far as the features of the text are concerned (the

amount of passages which would provide an occasion for the occurrence of the

69

given types). Nevertheless, even the texts available to us are sufficient to detect

the main tendencies and to evaluate interferences in students‟ translations.

It is also interesting to see how the occurrence of borderline cases reflects in

the overall proportion of all the interferential types. As we have already

mentioned, the borderline cases contain examples which are primarily

influenced by the source text but which are already halfway to perfection.

Although it is quite difficult to state what examples pertain to borderline cases, I

tried to assess these quite rigorously so that the results would be valid and

significant. The average occurrence ranges from 0.3 to 1.6 for the individual

texts and the manifestation is fairly balanced. No significant variations have

been found in the students‟ translations.

Generally speaking, we have observed that, in many cases, the mistakes

due to interference have reoccurred in translations of more students. Passages

where potential interference may occur are sometimes quite easily identifiable.

5.2. Results Summarizing the Types of Interferences in Concrete

Students’ Translations

As has already been mentioned, some students translated more texts and

we have decided to create separate tables for their results to see if the

occurrence of the individual interferential types manifests evenly in their

translations. It allows us to reveal their individual tendencies towards

interference. In fact, this method can be used as a part of assessment in the

classroom. The students would obtain the results containing the amount of

interference in certain number of their translations. These tables will reveal to

70

them their main weaknesses and they will see what level they should focus on

primarily.

The tables have been established for 17 students but we will not deal with

results of all these people. Only some of the interesting examples and variances

from the average occurrence will be mentioned, and the results will be

summarized rather generally. We will refer to the students using their initials.

There was a student (TJ) who translated all of the texts from the corpus and

2 students (AM and DK) who translated 5 texts out of 6. The other 14 students

translated 3 texts each. We will focus on the results of the 3 students (TJ, AM

and DK) a little bit more. In case of student TJ, the proportion of the individual

types expressed in percents was actually more or less consistent with the

overall results mentioned in the previous chapter. The following table provides a

comparison between the results of TJ and the overall results from the whole

corpus:

Lexic. Interf.

Syntactic Interf.

Gram. Interf.

Borderline cases

Interf. in Typogr.

Miscellaneous

Overall results

36% 27% 11% 8% 8% 11%

TJ 34% 26% 13% 6% 8% 13% Table 11: Student TJ and the overall results

The total amount of interferences in her texts amounts to 62. The numbers

in her table are quite equilibrated, the only significant imbalance occurs in text A

on the level of grammatical interference (7 interferences out of 8 occur in this

text). Nevertheless, this is probably influenced by the nature of the original

because, as we stated in the previous chapter, text A featured an extremely

high number of grammatical interferences. The student should focus her

attention mainly on lexical interference because this type occurs in her

translations most frequently. Going through her translations again and noticing

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the concrete problems should help her to avoid these mistakes. This student

serves as a sample because she translated all of the texts from the corpus and

the results are, more or less, consistent with those deduced from the overall

results.

Student AM and student DK translated the same set of texts (A, B, C, E, and

F), which allows us to compare their results in parallel.

Lexic. Interf.

Syntactic Interf.

Grammat. Interf.

Borderline cases

Interf. in Typography

Miscellaneous

Overall results

36% 27% 11% 8% 8% 11%

AM 21% 24% 15% 14% 17% 9%

DK 34% 28% 12% 14% 5% 8% Table 12: Students AM and DK

These two students manifest a similar amount of interferences – student AM

has 66 interferences in total and student DK has 65 examples. In case of

student AM, some personal tendencies are obvious. A fairly small amount of

lexical interference occurs in her translations, compared to the other students.

On the other hand, she has quite a high frequency of interference in typography

(11 occurrences). She is, probably, one of the people who pay more attention to

the linguistic aspects of a text and fail to concentrate on the formal aspect of a

translation. Most interferences occur on the level of syntax, nevertheless, it is

not that bad compared to others. The occurrences in her table seem fairly

evenly distributed. Also in the case of this student, the number of grammatical

interferences has grown due to text A (6 out of the total 10 occurrences

originated here). Student DK seems to be a little bit different case. These two

students reveal that although the style of the text influences, to certain extent,

the amount of the types of interferences, individual tendencies play an important

role. Student DK, unlike the student AM, has the biggest problems on the level

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of lexis. His results are more similar to the overall outcomes. The only point in

which he differs is grammatical interference in text A. Only one occurrence was

found in his translation. It shows that although the nature of the text influences

the occurrence of grammatical interference in most students‟ translations,

personal tendencies largely affect the actual incidence because student DK, for

example, was able to avoid it.

Texts B, D and F were translated by 8 people. Most of the students

translating this set of texts (except 1 person) had more lexical interference than

the syntactic one. In 5 cases, the proportion of lexical interference even

exceeded 50%. Grammatical interference was fairly low in their translations – at

maximum 2 occurrences per person were found. On the other hand, there are

more differences between the results of the 5 people translating the other set of

texts – A, C and E. Grammatical interference was higher in their translations

than in case of the people translating the first set of texts (B, D and F); the

occurrences ranged from 3 to 8. Lexical interference was lower than in the case

of the students translating texts B, D, F. Only 1 student (IK) exceeded 50% and,

in her case, the amount of lexical interference was probably caused by a

personal tendency because this type appeared quite evenly in all of her

translations and the mistakes were of a similar kind. Besides her, there are

several students in whose translations certain type of interference occurs with

an unusual frequency and the mistakes very often repeat in their target texts. In

these cases, we can almost certainly state that interference is a personal

phenomenon of the individual and the student should thus be warned against

the particular mistakes. For example, this concerns the already mentioned

student AM and her tendency towards interference in typography and a similar

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case of student SS (27% interference in typography, i.e. 7 occurrences out of

the total 26). Nevertheless, the numbers are so high, in their case, also because

of the fact that the numbers of the other types are quite low (they do not have

serious problems on the level of lexis, syntax and grammar). Another example

is student JM in whose translations grammatical interference occurs quite often

(27%). In fact, these types of interference seem to be the easiest to avoid and

as soon as the students will become fully aware that particularly this type occurs

with unusual frequency in their translations, they will very fast work their

translations up to perfection.

Obviously, interference occurs in translations of all students. Lexical and

syntactic interferences are the most frequent and they are probably the most

difficult to avoid. One of the suggestions for all the students is that it might be

helpful to read carefully the original text before they start the actual translation

process and mark the passages where they feel an interference may occur.

This can help them to avoid interference in their final translations. They would

take account of these potential problems in advance and this would force them

to seek a better solution in the actual process of translation. For example, false

friends are easily traceable, syntactic structures untypical of Czech and

grammatical differences are often also perceivable during attentive reading and

typographical aspect is obvious at first sight. This could largely reduce the

occurrence of interference in their translations because they would consciously

reflect on these problems. Of course, probably not all of the problems of this

kind will be settled but quite a considerable amount of the actual mistakes seem

to be caused by inattentive reading and lack of reflection over the translation. At

least, this method can help to eliminate the most serious errors.

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5.3. Interesting Examples

Some of the interesting examples from the corpus will be included in this

chapter. Although there are several cases worth mentioning, it is impossible to

include all of these; only four of them have been chosen to be discussed in this

chapter. These are either interferences which occur with unusual frequency in

students‟ translations or instances from the original texts which are somehow

unique and it is interesting to see how the students handle such occurrences.

Interesting examples of syntactic interferences occurred in text C. These

interferences do not cause errors but they rather have to do with differences in

conventions of the two languages:

Born in Toyama Prefecture in 1953. – *Narozen v prefektuře Tojama roku 1953. Born in Tokyo in 1927. – *Narozen v Tokiu roku 1927.

Someone may not even notice that there is something strange at first sight;

nevertheless, the order of the information may be disturbing for an attentive

reader. In Czech, it would sound more fluent if the year preceded the place. The

reason why it is mentioned here is that 50% of the students (5 students out of

10) translated it literally from English; in other words, half of the students

preserved the original order of the English sentence and did not probably think

about the possibility of changing it so that it sounded better in Czech. The other

half realized this and changed the order of the information. I am pretty sure

though that if the people were asked to write a sentence containing such

information in Czech, they would use the reverse order (the year first and the

place at the end). These instances have been marked as syntactic interferences

because they have to do with the order of the words rather than the semantic

75

meaning (the words are translated correctly, only the sequence would be

different in a natural Czech sentence).

Another example worth mentioning is taken from text B, the article about

antropomorphism in design. And particularly translation of the expression

antropomorphism is the issue to be mentioned here. One third of the students

(7 out of 21) translated this term literally as antropomorfismus6, the rest of the

people preferred the more correct expression antropomorfizace (or also

antropomorfizování). This case has been included into grammatical interference

because the problem consists in translating directly the morphological form of

the word. In fact, antropomorphism is an act and, thus, the expression used by

the majority of the students is more appropriate. On the other hand, the suffix -

ismus has a slightly different connotation in Czech. Mostly, the words

expressing a style, an estate or an attitude possess this suffix (i.e., words which

connotate a rather static approach). Of course, this example is not necessarily

an error but there is a minute change in the connotative meaning due to literal

translation of the grammatical form. Students very often do not realize such

differences and, in some case, a literal translation of a morphological form can

cause a more serious mistake.

An unusual phenomenon occurs in text D, dealing with separation anxiety,

and it is interesting to see how the students handle it. The author swaps the

gender of the baby in separate paragraphs. First, she talks about the baby

using the masculine gender, but then, she refers to it using the feminine gender.

Most of the students decided to “ignore” this feature and preferred the

“unmarked solution”, i.e. masculine gender, or they used the neuter dítě.

6 The word occurred several times in the text but we have counted it only once per translation.

76

Although this is not directly connected to our topic, it is worth mentioning

because it, indeed, shows that the students realized this specificity of the text

and they were able to avoid potential interference which would cause confusion

in Czech.

And the last issue to be discussed here is an example taken from text C, the

discussion of two Japanese scientists about robotics. This example concerns

lexical interference which occurred in more than 50% of the translations. A

similar example occurred several times elsewhere but this case has been

chosen to demonstrate the problem. Six students out of ten translated National

Children’s Hospital as národní dětská nemocnice. If the word Children’s was

omitted, most of the students would undoubtedly use the more correct

translation státní nemocnice (instead of národní nemocnice). The inserted

expression probably caused that the students did not realize that such a phrase

did not collocate in Czech.

There are many other examples of this kind; but, unfortunately, we cannot

mention them all. In most cases, the discrepancies caused by interference

appeared repeatedly in translations of several different students. Some of the

examples mentioned are not serious mistakes but there are better solutions

which can contribute to the fluency of a translation. On their way to proficiency,

students should take notice of these discrepancies and work on the quality of

their translations.

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6. SUPPLEMENTARY DATA: COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

The following chapters will be devoted to the tasks which have been

assigned to students of translation in order to find out how they perceive

interference. In the first task, the students obtained text D with one of the

translations from the corpus. They were asked to mark interferences in the

target text. For comparison, we have asked teachers of translation to do the

same thing; nevertheless, we are more interested in the results obtained from

the students. The second task was a questionnaire inquiring about the students‟

view of interference. They were given the questionnaires one week after the

completion of the first task.

6.1. Interference Identification Task

This kind of analysis will reveal to which extent the students are sensitive to

interference. Although we ask them directly about their views of this

phenomenon in the questionnaires, the interference identification task will

reveal their actual attitude towards it. For that reason, they were asked to

complete the interference identification task first (to see what is the reality), and

the questionnaires second (which will reveal their personal conviction about this

phenomenon). Moreover, we are interested in whether the students will agree

on most of the interferences or whether their perceptions will be different.

For this task, a translation from the corpus which contained a fairly high

amount of interference had been chosen. Both, the original and the target text,

were distributed among students of Master‟s Degree in translation (and

teachers of translation) and the subjects were supposed to accomplish this task

at home. They were not asked to classify the individual occurrences according

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to the types as we did in the analysis. They were asked just to tag the

expressions in which they thought any type of interference occurred. Results

from 22 students and 4 teachers have been obtained. As far as the method of

evaluating the results is concerned, all of the marked segments were put into a

table (included on the CD) and we counted the number of people who

highlighted the given expressions. Then, the values were converted into

percentage (100% corresponds to all of the 22 students) and a scale reflecting

consensus of the students was created7.

Frequency of occurrence

Class

100% – 70% General consensus

69% – 30% Weaker consensus

29% – 0% Odd cases Table13: The scale reflecting consensus of the students

In total, there are 77 different segments marked as interferences in students‟

assignments (64 in those completed by teachers). Surprisingly, only 3 examples

belong to the class of general consensus and 11 cases to weaker consensus.

The remaining 63 passages fall into odd cases. The 3 segments which resulted

to be examples of clear interference are the following:

Segment A: [...] father would be with him to validate his feelings [...] – [...] otec, který by *uznal jeho pocity [...] Segment B: [...] we don’t manufacture those events. – [...] tyto *události nevyrábíme. Segment C: [...] and recognize the validity of her experience. – [...] a pochopit *uznání své zkušenosti.

All of these are highlighted as interferences even in my analysis and in the

teachers‟ versions (symbolized by the values 1 to 4 in the graph). These three

7 The results from the interference identification tasks completed by the teachers were not

converted into percentage (there were only 4 of them which was insufficient for such a conversion).

79

segments were marked by 16 students each (i.e. by 73% of the students). Only

1 teacher marked segment A which is quite interesting because students

agreed on this example and it is marked as a clear lexical interference even in

our analysis. The following graph illustrates the values for each segment. My

participation is represented by the value 1.

0

5

10

15

20

Se g m e n t A Se g m e n t B Se g m e n t C

M y p ar ticip atio n

Stu d e n ts

T e ach e r s

Graph 2: General consensus

On average, the students marked 12 interferences in the text (the lowest

value was 3 and the highest value reached 29). I have found 18 examples of

interference in this translation and the teachers highlighted 25 interferences on

average. Evidently, the teachers are generally more sensitive to interference

than the students. The students quite differ in the perception of this

phenomenon and the degree to which they are able to tolerate interference is

obviously varying. It should be emphasized that in some cases the students

marked even mistakes or discrepancies which were not caused by direct

interference, indeed. To give examples of this phenomenon, it concerns the

following passages:

[...] there is no purpose in staging opportunities for a child to cry. – [...] není důvod, abychom svému dítěti příležitosti k pláči *organizovali. [...] [he] was peaceful about being apart from me. – [...] *byl srovnaný s tím, že byl ode mě oddělen8.

8 The second part of the passage “[...] byl ode mě oddělen” is an interference and it was marked

by 36% of the students.

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[...] we give supportive attention to the child’s fears and tears; – [...] *podpoříme se zájmem slzy a strach *našeho dítěte. Although these translations definitely sound weird, they are not examples of

direct interference from English. The first sentence was marked by 32% of the

students, the second and the third examples by 9% each. These examples

appeared even in the teachers‟ versions. The subjects probably highlighted

even the indirect interference; nevertheless, in this research and in the analysis

of the students‟ translations, we have focused only on the direct influence from

the source text.

All of the cases which have been marked in my analysis of this text appear

in the students‟ versions but some of them fall into the odd cases according to

the students. For example, the phrase in addition to needing to nurse translated

as kromě toho, že by potřeboval *pochovat was marked only by 18% of the

people, whereas I consider it an example of clear lexical interference.

I have not classified the students‟ choices according to the types so I will not

draw conclusions regarding this aspect; but, generally, it can be stated that very

often the choices contained a verb, or more concretely, the verb did not

collocate with the subject. The students also noticed incorrect translations of

word meanings, which means that the lexical aspect seemed important to them.

Generally speaking, the results from the interference identification task show

that the students‟ perception of interference in translations is quite subjective.

Only 3 instances from the whole text fall into the class of general consensus. It

seems that the degree to which the students are sensitive to interference

depends largely on their individual views. The total numbers of interferences

which they marked in the text were different in their versions (they ranged from

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3 to 29). Moreover, some people, for example, marked cases which they

personally felt disturbing but which were perfectly tolerable for other people

(even for the teachers). The answers from the second task will be analysed in

the following subchapter and we will see if any coherence between the results

from these two tasks can be observed.

6.2. Questionnaires

The second task assigned to students consisted in answering the

questionnaires which they completed anonymously and on the spot (the full

version is included on the enclosed CD). The students were given it one week

after completing the first task and answers from 23 respondents have been

obtained. In total there are 18 questions inquiring about the students‟

awareness of interference and their perception of this phenomenon. The first 4

questions are rather general, finding out something about the students (gender,

the name of their degree program, the semester of their Master‟s studies and

the number of translation courses they have attended). Questions 5 to 17 ask

about the students‟ perception of interference and the last question challenges

the students to express their suggestions and observations concerning this

topic. The table summarizing the actual answers (and observations of the

students) is included in the Appendix. We will not deal with individual questions

in detail; but, we will look at those cases which the majority of the students

either agreed on or in which their answers varied widely.

The students were asked about their perception of interference and 70% of

the people replied that they think interference can be tolerated as a

phenomenon typical of most translations (of course, as far as the meaning of

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the source text is preserved). Nevertheless, 52% of the people stated that

translations should sound as if they were originals and none of them chose the

option that a translation should be recognizable at first sight. These two

statements are apparently contradictory – on the one hand, the students

confess that they tolerate the occurrence of interference in translations; on the

other hand, the majority states that a translation should read as an original. It

can be inferred from this that probably the ideal situation, according to them,

would be if a translation was not recognizable at first sight, nevertheless, if

interference occurs they are able to tolerate it to a certain degree. Their

answers vary in the question which inquires whether interference is an error or

not; 39% of the students replied that even if the meaning of the source text is

preserved, but the formulation is unnatural due to the influence from English, it

is an error. Others did not consider it an error (as far as the meaning is

preserved) or they state that it depends on the concrete example; the quality of

a translation is affected but it does not necessarily have to be an error. All of the

students assume that the fact that they are warned against interference at

school helps them; nevertheless, they are quite divided on the issue concerning

the emphasis teachers place on interference. In fact, this is related to

Kussmaul‟s theory of fear of interference and we wanted to find out what the

students personally think about this phenomenon. It seems that this is a rather

subjective issue – 35% of the respondents state that the importance of doing

away with this phenomenon is sometimes exaggerated, nevertheless, 26%

think that the teachers still do not place enough emphasis on interference. And

the rest of the people assume that warning students against interference is

necessary. The students were also asked if they personally notice any

83

improvement, and 74% acknowledged that thanks to the experience they had

gained so far, they had managed to avoid some of the types of interference –

mostly syntactic and grammatical.

Questions 13 and 14 are particularly interesting because they inquire about

which types of interference the students consider the most frequent and which

are the most serious according to them. They responded that the most frequent

interferences occur on the level of syntax (74% of the respondents) while the

most serious ones are at the level of lexis (52% of the respondents). It seems

that the students generally consider syntactic interferences as those making the

text sound unnatural but which do not cause serious errors. On the other hand,

lexical interferences seem to be perceived as errors. They confirmed this

attitude in question 17 to which 91% of the people answered that, for example,

if it happened that they came across a false friend (or a “good friend”), they

were aware of the fact that a potential error could occur and they always

considered the meaning such a word possessed in the given context. Only then

they decided for the best solution. This shows that the students feel that lexical

interferences can cause serious mistakes and they probably focus mainly on

this level.

Question 15 asks the students what they do before starting the actual

translation. Most people responded that they read the whole document first and

that they detected passages containing unknown words, idioms, metaphors,

etc. Surprisingly, none of the students replied that he/she detected places

where potential interference could occur before starting the actual translation

process, although it is advisable for them to learn to use this method.

84

To conclude, the results from the questionnaires revealed the students‟

personal perception of interference and their views of this phenomenon.

Generally speaking, it is obvious that students are fully aware of the fact that

interference occurs in their translations and, to a certain extent, they consider it

a problem. Nevertheless, they are fairly tolerant towards interference and admit

that, although it should not appear in good translations, they are able to excuse

the occurrence as a phenomenon typical of translations. It is definitely

interesting to see their personal considerations of this issue and to compare

their views with what actually occurs in students‟ translations in general. We will

focus on this comparison in chapter 7. The first part of the research (the

analysis of students‟ translations) revealed the actual behaviour of the students,

the second part (interference identification task) was dealing with the students‟

sensitivity to interference in translations, and the third part was a questionnaire

which asked the students about their perception of this phenomenon. The

individual findings will be triangulated in the following chapter.

85

7. TRIANGULATION

In this chapter we will triangulate the results obtained from the individual

parts of the research, i.e. results from the analyses of students‟ translations, the

interference identification task and the questionnaires. We will search for

connections and summarize the findings.

The most obvious finding which has resulted from the analysis of students‟

translations is that lexical and syntactic interferences occur with the greatest

frequency. These two types are more or less at the same level as far as the

occurrence is concerned (lexical interference slightly outnumbers the syntactic

one in the overall results). Nevertheless, according to the answers from the

questionnaires, 74% of the students consider syntactic interference the most

frequent type. On the other hand, lexical interference is in their opinion the most

serious one and the students assert that they pay a lot of attention to false

friends because they are aware of the fact that a serious error due to

interference may occur on this level. But, if we look at the results from the

analyses, this type of interference still causes difficulties for students. Although

they are all fully aware of the fact that most problems occur on the level of

syntax and lexis, the results show that these interferences are still the most

common ones.

The results from the interference identification task revealed that the

students were not quite unanimous in the determination of interference. They

clearly agreed only on 3 segments. What follows from this phenomenon is that

the students should probably learn to reflect more on interferences in target

texts – either in their own or in translations of other people (e.g. their

colleagues). They should pay as much attention to feedbacks and post-

86

reflection as possible. This could help them to avoid, at least, serious mistakes

caused by interference, and in the course of time, as they gain experience, they

should be able to better withstand interference. In addition to post-reflection on

translations, the students should learn to detect passages where potential

interference could occur even before starting to translate. In the questionnaire,

none of the students replied that he/she did this before starting the actual

translation process. Detecting the passages first could help to avoid at least the

most serious interferences. Some of the cases are evident at first sight (e.g.

false friends) and, with experience gained, the students will not need to think

about the passages so much. The process will become natural for them and

they will be able to avoid interference more easily. The fact that they start

translating directly results in fundamental errors occurring in students‟

translations or in unnaturalness and clumsiness of a target text.

Moreover, we have seen in chapter 5 that the distribution of individual types

of interference sometimes depends on the text, and even personal tendencies

of individual students have been evident in several cases. The answers to

question 11 demonstrate that the capacity to avoid certain types of interference

is rather individual-dependent; 61%9 of the students state that they are better

able to withstand syntactic interference, 52% marked grammatical interference,

35% state that they manage to avoid lexical interference and 13% of the

students ticked option d, i.e. other types of interference. Their view of this issue

differs and obviously the perception of this question is rather subjective.

Although the students are convinced that they are better able to withstand the

three types of interference (syntactic, grammatical and lexical interferences),

9 Students marked more than one answer.

87

the actual results from the analysis showed that the proportion of these types is

still fairly high. Unfortunately, we did not examine the students‟ improvement in

time so we cannot state whether any significant change concerning

interferences occurs in their translations.

The interference identification task revealed that the students perceive

interference quite differently. What some marked as interference was perfectly

tolerable for others (even for the teachers). It seems that some students

highlighted only those expressions which contained really serious mistakes

(according to them) but they tolerated the cases in which interference “only”

resulted in an unnatural translation. Others perceived the unnatural translation

as interference but they sometimes did not notice the “more serious” cases. In

the questionnaires, 70% of the students ticked the option that interference can

be tolerated to a certain degree as a phenomenon typical of most translations.

As far as the meaning of the source text is preserved, the students are able to

tolerate interferences in translations. On the other hand, 13% of the students

state that this phenomenon is a serious problem which complicates

understanding of the text. Nevertheless, it seems that most students are not

absolutely confident about what should be marked as an example of

interference and their perceptions are quite subjective.

As has already been mentioned (mainly in chapters 2.1. and 4.2.1.) students

sometimes fail to consider the context in which a certain word appears. They

focus on the level of words and do not consider its meaning in the given text.

The students sometimes translate a sequence word for word, concentrate on

the individual parts and fail to consider the whole sentence. In the analysis, we

have seen that most lexical interferences occur due to this fact (several

88

examples have been included in chapter 4.2.1). In the questionnaires, 57% of

the students state that if it happens that interference occurs in their final version,

it is because they think there is no better solution. They leave it in their

translation and believe that the target reader will still understand and tolerate it.

This in fact explains why the students state that they tolerate interferences to a

certain degree. Nevertheless, this is certainly not the right approach. They

should always try to work their translations to perfection, pay as much attention

to the final readings as possible and to consider the whole context (not to focus

only on the parts of it). 30% of the students marked that they are often aware of

the occurrence of interference beforehand (when they are submitting the

translation, they know there are certain places which are not ideal) and 17%

answered that they only realize the mistakes in class (from the feedback). Yet,

in the interference identification task, several students seemed to consider even

the broader context and they realized interferences caused by the fact that the

word was inappropriate for the given context because the translator focused on

the individual expressions rather than on the whole sentences. It seems that

although the students know about the need to consider the context of an

expression first, they sometimes fail to do this in their own translations.

Nevertheless, with gaining experience, they will certainly be able to reflect on

this type of mistakes and it will be easier for them to withstand interference.

To conclude, we have triangulated the most important results from the three

parts of the research. It is interesting to compare the findings from the analyses

with what students personally think about this issue and what is their approach

towards interference in translations.

89

8. CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

This thesis has focused on interference in students‟ translations. The

concept of interference has been presented in the theoretical part, and theories

and research by several scholars have been discussed. The major part of the

research includes the analyses of students‟ translations. For this purpose, a

classification containing 6 types of interferences has been established and

individual examples have been classified according to it. The other part of the

research consists of supplementary data obtained from two tasks assigned to

students of translation. First, they were given an interference identification task,

i.e. they were asked to mark interference in one of the students‟ translations

from the corpus. And second, they were given questionnaires which inquired

about their perception of this phenomenon. Results from these parts have been

summarized in the individual chapters and the most important issues have been

triangulated in chapter 7.

It would certainly be interesting to examine this issue in more detail because

many questions remain unanswered. For example, it would be interesting to

research interference and its development throughout the studies of concrete

students; choose several people at the beginning of their studies, collect their

translations in the course of gaining experience and examine whether they are

able to withstand interference at the end of their studies. Moreover, one half of

the students could be told to detect passages where potential interference could

occur every time before they start to translate (the other half of the students

could have freedom in this respect). The results would reveal whether this

method really helps. Nevertheless, a rather long time-span would be needed for

this research.

90

This thesis has provided a fundamental insight into interference occurring in

students‟ translations and the results may serve as a basis for further research.

Moreover, the method used for the analysis and the classification introduced

can be useful for translation training and for assessment of students.

We will conclude this thesis with Newmark‟s quotation which perfectly

reflects the nature of this phenomenon: “In fact, interference is the spectre of

most professional translators, the fear that haunts the translation students; the

ever present-trap” (Newmark 1991: 81).

91

9. RÉSUMÉ

9.1. English

The main objective of this thesis is to examine interference in students‟

translations on their way towards proficiency. The first part of the thesis deals

with interference from the theoretical point of view. Definitions and research by

several scholars are discussed and different perspectives of this phenomenon

are presented. The practical part of the research consists of three major parts.

The analysis of students‟ translations is the most important part: the

occurrences of interference have been classified according to six types which

have been defined in chapter 4.2. (Lexical, syntactic, grammatical interference,

borderline cases, interference in typography and miscellaneous types of

interference), and the results have been summarized in chapter 5. The method

of analysis used in this research could serve as a didactic tool – for example, as

a part of the feedback in class. The students would see which type of

interference occurs with the greatest frequency and they could primarily pay

attention to that particular level. In a sense, it could help them to work with

greater confidence and more effectively if they knew what types of mistakes

they should focus on first and foremost. The second part of the research

consists in an interference identification task. The students were given one of

the translations from the corpus (they obtained even the source text) and they

were asked to highlight passages where, according to them, interference

occurred. They were not asked to classify the cases according to the types

mentioned, their task was only to identify interference. It is interesting to see the

extent to which the students are sensitive to interferences occurring in

translations. We asked even several teachers of translation to complete this

92

task so that we could compare their results. And the last part of the research

was a questionnaire which inquired about the students‟ perceptions and views

of interference. The results have been processed quantitatively and the main

tendencies or differences in their views have been summarized in chapter 6.2.

Individual results from each part of the research have been summarized in

separate chapters and the main outcomes have been triangulated at the end of

the thesis. It is particularly interesting to see how the students perceive this

phenomenon and compare it with reality. The results revealed that the students

are fully aware of the fact that interference occurs in their translations but,

according to the analysis, the major problems still persist in their translations.

To conclude, this research examines interference from three different points

of view and triangulates the results obtained from each part. It seems that

although students are conscious of interference in their translations, it is quite

difficult for them to eliminate it. Students should focus more on this issue during

translating and a piece of advice which could help them to withstand

interference is mentioned in the thesis (mainly in chapters 5.2. and 7).

9.2. Czech

Hlavním cílem této diplomové práce je sledovat, jak se v překladech

studentů na jejich cestě k překladatelské kariéře projevuje interference. Úvodní

část práce se zabývá interferencí z teoretického hlediska a jsou zde

představeny různé úhly pohledu na tento jev. Praktická část práce je založena

na třech typech výzkumu (analýza studentských překladů, vyznačování

interferencí studenty a dotazník), přičemž analýza studentských překladů je z

nich nejdůležitější. V korpusu byly vyznačeny interference, které byly poté

93

klasifikovány na základě šesti skupin popsaných v kapitole 4.2. (lexikální,

syntaktická a gramatická interference, mezní případy, typografická interference

a skupina zahrnující ostatní případy). Výsledky jsou shrnuty v kapitole 5.

Metoda použitá při vyhodnocování výskytu jednotlivých typů interferencí by

mohla sloužit i jako součást hodnocení studentských překladů. Studenti by z

výsledků zjistili, jaký typ interference se v jejich pracích objevuje nejčastěji, a

mohli by se tak zaměřit na daný problém. V jistém smyslu by jim to dodalo

jistotu, a pokud by věděli, na co konkrétně se mají soustředit v první řadě, mohli

by na odstranění interferencí pracovat efektivněji. Druhá část výzkumu se

věnuje úkolu, který byl zadán studentům. Měli vyznačit interference v jednom z

překladů z korpusu (spolu s překladem dostali i zdrojový text). Místa, která

podle nich obsahovala interferenci, měli pouze zvýraznit, nikoli klasifikovat

podle výše zmíněných typů. Zajímalo nás, do jaké míry jsou studenti na

interferenci citliví a zda se v identifikaci shodnou. Pro srovnání jsme požádali i

několik vyučujících, aby splnili stejný úkol. Poslední část výzkumu tvoří

dotazníky, které obsahují otázky týkající se vnímání interference studenty a

jejich pohledu na tento jev. Výsledky byly kvantitativně zpracovány a v kapitole

6.2. jsou shrnuty hlavní tendence studentů nebo naopak případy, ve kterých se

jejich odpovědi značně lišily. Zjištění z jednotlivých částí výzkumu jsou

porovnána na konci této práce (v kapitole 7). Je zajímavé pozorovat, jak

studenti interferenci vnímají, a porovnat jejich názor se skutečností.

Diplomová práce pohlíží na interferenci ze tří různých úhlů pohledu a

porovnává výsledky získané z jednotlivých částí výzkumu. Zdá se, že ačkoli

studenti interferenci ve svých překladech vnímají, tento problém u nich stále

přetrvává a těžko se jej zbavují. Měli by se při překládání více zaměřit na

94

potenciální výskyt interference a my jim v této práci (především v kapitolách 5.2.

a 7) radíme, jak by bylo možné vlivu zdrojového jazyka alespoň do jisté míry

čelit.

95

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Baker, Mona and Saldanha, Gabriela (2009) Routledge Encyclopedia of

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at: <http://books.google.cz/>. Accessed Jan 2010.

Franco Aixelá, Javier (2009) “An Overview of Interference in Scientific and

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<http://www.jostrans.org/issue11/issue11_toc.php>. Accessed Jan 2010.

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<http://www.skase.sk/Volumes/JTI02/pdf_doc/2.pdf>. Accessed Jan

2010.

Kufnerová, Zlata (1994) Překládání a čeština. Jinočany: H & H.

Kufnerová, Zlata (2009) Čtení o překládání. Jinočany: H & H.

Kussmaul, Paul (1995) Training the Translator. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John

Benjamins Publishing Company.

Levý, Jiří (1983) Umění překladu. Praha: Panorama.

Malkiel, Brenda (2006) “The Effect of Translator Training on Interference and

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Newmark, Peter (1988) A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall

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Newmark, Peter (1991) About Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Popovič, Anton (1975) Teória umeleckého prekladu. Bratislava: Tatran.

Thorovský, Martin (2009) “Lexical Linguistic Interference in Translations of

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97

Appendix

Results from the analyses:

TEXT A Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

AM 5 2 6 2 5 0 20

DR 6 2 0 1 0 1 10

DK 3 1 1 2 0 0 7

HV 2 2 2 0 0 2 8

IK 10 3 6 1 0 0 20

JM 4 1 6 1 0 2 14

KF 4 3 3 2 2 1 15

PS 6 4 3 1 0 0 14

SS 3 3 2 1 0 0 9

TJ 4 7 7 0 3 1 22

VB 6 4 2 1 0 2 15

TOTAL 53 32 38 12 10 9 154

Average 4,8 2,9 3,5 1,1 0,9 0,8 14

TEXT B Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline Cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

AV 0 4 1 0 1 2 8

AM 0 2 0 1 1 2 6

BR 1 3 0 1 2 2 9

DR 1 2 0 0 0 2 5

DK 2 2 1 0 1 2 8

GS 0 3 1 0 0 2 6

JT 0 1 0 0 0 0 1

JB 1 2 0 2 0 2 7

KZ 2 3 0 0 2 0 7

LJ 2 5 1 1 2 2 13

99

LD 1 2 1 0 0 2 6

MKo 0 1 2 1 1 2 7

MKr 3 2 0 0 1 2 8

PK 0 3 1 1 0 0 5

PM 1 3 0 0 0 2 6

PS 1 1 0 0 2 2 6

PD 1 3 0 0 0 2 6

SS 1 3 1 0 3 1 9

TJ 2 0 0 0 0 2 4

VK 1 1 0 0 0 2 4

VV 1 1 1 0 1 0 4

TOTAL 21 47 10 7 17 33 135

Average 1 2,2 0,5 0,3 0,8 1,6 6,4

TEXT C Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline Cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

AM 1 3 0 3 4 2 13

DK 8 7 6 4 2 1 28

HV 4 4 0 1 2 4 15

IK 10 5 1 3 2 3 24

JM 4 1 1 1 4 0 11

KF 9 8 1 1 0 3 22

PS 12 13 1 1 2 4 33

SS 0 1 0 0 4 3 8

TJ 7 3 1 2 2 4 19

VB 1 3 0 0 0 2 6

TOTAL 56 48 11 16 22 26 179

Average 5,6 4,8 1,1 1,6 2,2 2,6 17,9

TEXT D Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline Cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

100

BR 0 0 0 1 1 0 2

GS 6 5 0 0 1 0 12

JB 2 1 0 1 1 0 5

LJ 5 5 5 1 0 0 16

MK 8 0 2 0 0 0 10

PS 1 1 0 0 0 0 2

PD 4 2 2 1 0 0 9

TJ 3 1 0 1 0 0 5

VK 3 2 0 0 0 0 5

VV 10 7 1 0 0 0 18

TOTAL 42 24 10 5 3 0 84

Average 4,2 2,4 1,0 0,5 0,3 0 8,4

TEXT E Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline Cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

KF 5 5 1 1 0 0 12

AM 2 6 3 0 0 1 12

DK 1 4 0 3 0 1 9

HV 1 0 4 0 2 1 8

IK 6 0 0 1 0 0 7

JM 0 3 1 0 1 0 5

TJ 1 3 0 1 0 0 5

VB 1 4 1 0 3 0 9

TOTAL 17 25 10 6 6 3 67

Average 2,1 3,1 1,3 0,8 0,8 0,4 8,4

TEXT F Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline Cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

AM 6 3 1 3 1 1 15

AV 6 4 0 1 0 1 12

BR 5 2 0 1 0 0 8

101

DK 8 4 0 0 0 1 13

GS 4 6 1 2 0 2 15

JB 5 1 1 1 0 1 9

KZ 9 2 0 2 0 0 13

LD 6 1 0 1 0 2 10

MKo 2 2 0 2 0 1 7

MKr 2 1 0 0 0 0 3

PK 5 1 0 0 0 0 6

PM 5 1 0 0 0 1 7

PS 7 1 1 1 0 0 10

PD 8 0 0 0 0 1 9

TJ 4 2 0 0 0 1 7

VK 4 0 0 1 0 1 6

VV 9 1 0 0 0 0 10

TOTAL 95 32 4 15 1 13 160

Average 5,6 1,9 0,2 0,9 0,1 0,8 9,4

Overall results 284 208 83 61 59 84 779

36% 27% 11% 8% 8% 11% 100% *

Concrete students:

AM Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 5 2 6 2 5 0 20

TEXT B 0 2 0 1 1 2 6

TEXT C 1 3 0 3 4 2 13

TEXT E 2 6 3 0 0 1 12

TEXT F 6 3 1 3 1 1 15

102

TOTAL 14 16 10 9 11 6 66

21% 24% 15% 14% 17% 9% 100% *

TJ Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 4 7 7 0 3 1 22

TEXT B 2 0 0 0 0 2 4

TEXT C 7 3 1 2 2 4 19

TEXT D 3 1 0 1 0 0 5

TEXT E 1 3 0 1 0 0 5

TEXT F 4 2 0 0 0 1 7

TOTAL 21 16 8 4 5 8 62

34% 26% 13% 6% 8% 13% 100% *

DK Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 3 1 1 2 0 0 7

TEXT B 2 2 1 0 1 2 8

TEXT C 8 7 6 4 2 1 28

TEXT E 1 4 0 3 0 1 9

TEXT F 8 4 0 0 0 1 13

TOTAL 22 18 8 9 3 5 65

34% 28% 12% 14% 5% 8% 100% *

SS Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 3 3 2 1 0 0 9

TEXT B 1 3 1 0 3 1 9

TEXT C 0 1 0 0 4 3 8

TOTAL 4 7 3 1 7 4 26

15% 27% 12% 4% 27% 15% 100% *

103

GS Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT B 0 3 1 0 0 2 6

TEXT D 6 5 0 0 1 0 12

TEXT F 4 6 1 2 0 2 15

TOTAL 10 14 2 2 1 4 33

30% 42% 6% 6% 3% 12% 100% *

BR Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT B 1 3 0 1 2 2 9

TEXT D 0 0 0 1 1 0 2

TEXT F 5 2 0 1 0 0 8

TOTAL 6 5 0 3 3 2 19

32% 26% 0% 16% 16% 11% 100% *

JB Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT B 1 2 0 2 0 2 7

TEXT D 2 1 0 1 1 0 5

TEXT F 5 1 1 1 0 1 9

TOTAL 8 4 1 4 1 3 21

38% 19% 5% 19% 5% 14% 100% *

VV Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT B 1 1 1 0 1 0 4

TEXT D 10 7 1 0 0 0 18

TEXT F 9 1 0 0 0 0 10

TOTAL 20 9 2 0 1 0 32

63% 28% 6% 0% 3% 0% 100% *

VK Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

104

TEXT B 1 1 0 0 0 2 4

TEXT D 3 2 0 0 0 0 5

TEXT F 4 0 0 1 0 1 6

TOTAL 8 3 0 1 0 3 15

53% 20% 0% 7% 0% 20% 100% *

PS Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT B 1 1 0 0 2 2 6

TEXT D 1 1 0 0 0 0 2

TEXT F 7 1 1 1 0 0 10

TOTAL 9 3 1 1 2 2 18

50% 17% 6% 6% 11% 11% 100% *

MKr Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT B 3 2 0 0 1 2 8

TEXT D 8 0 2 0 0 0 10

TEXT F 2 1 0 0 0 0 3

TOTAL 13 3 2 0 1 2 21

62% 14% 10% 0% 5% 10% 100% *

PD Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT B 1 3 0 0 0 2 6

TEXT D 4 2 2 1 0 0 9

TEXT F 8 0 0 0 0 1 9

TOTAL 13 5 2 1 0 3 24

54% 21% 8% 4% 0% 13% 100% *

HV Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 2 2 2 0 0 2 8

105

TEXT C 4 4 0 1 2 4 15

TEXT E 1 0 4 0 2 1 8

TOTAL 7 6 6 1 4 7 31

23% 19% 19% 3% 13% 23% 100% *

VB Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 6 4 2 1 0 2 15

TEXT C 1 3 0 0 0 2 6

TEXT E 1 4 1 0 3 0 9

TOTAL 8 11 3 1 3 4 30

27% 37% 10% 3% 10% 13% 100% *

JM Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 4 1 6 1 0 2 14

TEXT C 4 1 1 1 4 0 11

TEXT E 0 3 1 0 1 0 5

TOTAL 8 5 8 2 5 2 30

27% 17% 27% 7% 17% 7% 100% *

IK Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 10 3 6 1 0 0 20

TEXT C 10 5 1 3 2 3 24

TEXT E 6 0 0 1 0 0 7

TOTAL 26 8 7 5 2 3 51

51% 16% 14% 10% 4% 6% 100% *

KF Lexical Syntactic Grammatical Borderline cases Typographical Miscellaneous TOTAL

TEXT A 4 3 3 2 2 1 15

TEXT C 9 8 1 1 0 3 22

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TEXT E 5 5 1 1 0 0 12

TOTAL 18 16 5 4 2 4 49

37% 33% 10% 8% 4% 8% 100% *

* Figures may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

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Questionnaires:

23 respondents = 100%

Questions Answers No. of students

Percentage Observations of the students

1. Gender: a. Male 3 13%

b. Female 20 87%

2. The name of your degree program:

English Language Translation 21 91%

English Language & Literature 2 9%

3. What semester of Master‟s studies are you in?

1st 1 4%

2nd 20 87%

3rd 1 4%

5th 1 4%

4. How many translation courses have you already attended?

a. 1 – 2 1 4%

b. 3 – 4 5 22%

c. 5 – 6 8 35%

d. more than 7 9 39%

5. Do you think interference is an error?

a. Yes! Even if the meaning of the source text is preserved, but the formulation is unnatural (the influence from English is evident), you consider it an error.

9 39%

b. No, as far as the meaning is preserved.

5 22% 1 student marked b and c

c. No! It affects the quality of a translation but it is not an error.

7 30%

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d. Other suggestions: 3 13% “I cannot judge so generally, there are

always individual cases. However, my

answer is that it is always an important

aspect to consider when translating, and

does not always have to be an error (e.g.

nominalizations in EN texts”

“I can imagine cases when interference is not an error, but in most cases I‟d say it is an error.” “It‟s not exactly an “error” as I understand it, if the meaning is preserved, but it affects the quality of the translation.”

6. You think that: a. interference is a serious problem which complicates understanding the text?

3 13%

b. interference can be tolerated (of course, if the meaning of the source text is the same) as a phenomenon typical of most translations?

16 70% “but I do not think it is a phenomenon typical of most translations. It should not be. It can be tolerated if it happens but it should be an excuse.”

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c. Other suggestions: 4 17% “Interference should not be tolerated, but it can be a very serious problem in some cases and not so serious one in others” “cannot be tolerated if there is no reason for this error” “Interference is a problem, but it does not necessarily complicate the understanding of the text. It is just disturbing.” “I would incline to a that it is a problem that sometimes complicates the understanding but do not think it is a serious one.”

7. Do you think the reader of a target text should clearly recognize that what he/she is reading is a translation?

a. Yes, I think translations should be recognizable at first sight.

0 0%

b. No, translations should sound as if they were originals.

12 52%

c. Translations should be recognized only after more careful reading.

7 30%

d. Other suggestions:

4 17% “Depends on what and why was translated” “Depends on text type and personal preferences (e.g. contract should not read as translation, but what with literary output?)” “I cannot judge so generally, there are always individual cases. However, my answer is that it is always an important aspect to consider when translating, and does not always have to be an error (e.g. nominalizations in EN texts” “Depends on the context (the text, the author, the readers, the translator‟s approach,...)”

110

8. You think that the fact that teachers of translation warn students against interference is:

a. Fine, but the importance of doing away with interference is sometimes exaggerated.

8 35%

b. Fine, but still it is not enough. 6 26%

c. Annoying because they place too much emphasis on it.

0 0%

d. Annoying, but it certainly is necessary.

4 17% “(Annoying), but it certainly is necessary!”

e. Other suggestions: 5 22% “Fine.” “Just fine” “Just fine” “Necessary, not annoying!” “I think it is just fine, I have not experienced teachers warning us against it, in fact”

9. Do you think that the fact that you are warned against interference at schools affects the quality of your translations?

a. Yes, I think I am better able to avoid it in my translations.

18 78% “I am aware of the problem, I pay more attention to it when translating.”

b. Yes, it helps but only very marginally.

5 22%

c. No, I do not think it helps in any way.

0 0%

d. Other suggestions:

0 0%

10. Thanks to the experience you have gained so far, do you think you have managed to avoid any of the types of interference outlined at the top of the first page?

a. I do not think so. 6 26%

b. Yes, I hope so.

17 74%

a. Lexical interference 8 35%

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11. If your answer to the previous question is “Yes, I hope so”, which one is the type of interference you think you are now better able to avoid: More than one answer can be marked

b. Syntactic interference

14 61%

c. Grammatical interference 12 52%

d. Other types

3 13% “punctuation”

12. When reading translations by other people (e.g. your colleagues), you:

a. immediately notice interference if there is some.

8 35%

b. hardly ever notice interference. 0 0%

c. feel the text reads a little bit unnatural but you do not mind (you tolerate it to a certain extent).

13 57%

d. Other suggestions:

2 9% “something between a and b” “Some interference I notice, some can‟t. The problem is that sometimes, when you are aware of it, it is very hard to think of a better solution, you as a practicing translator understand this and tolerate it to a certain degree.”

13. According to you, the most frequent interferences occur at the level of:

a. lexis 6 26% One person marked a and c

b. syntax 17 74% One person marked b and c

c. grammar 2 9%

d. other 0 0%

14. According to you, the most serious interferences occur at the level of:

a. lexis 12 52% One person marked a and b

b. syntax 9 39% One person marked b and c

c. grammar 4 17%

d. other 0 0%

a. read THE WHOLE document first? 19 83%

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15. Before starting your translation, do you: More than one answer can be marked

b. detect potential problematic passages (unknown words, metaphors, idioms, difficult syntactic structures, etc.)?

17 74%

c. detect places where potential interference could occur?

0 0%

d. Other suggestions:

1 4% “I think that detecting problematic passages implies detecting places of potential interference”

16. If it happens that interference occurs in your final version:

a. you are aware of that beforehand. (When you are submitting your translation you know there are certain places which are not ideal, or where interference is obvious.)

7 30% One person: “either a or b”

b. you only realize your mistake in class/in the feedback.

4 17%

c. it is because you think there is no better solution so you leave it in your text believing that the target reader will still understand and tolerate it?

13 57%

17. If it happens that you come across a word which has a formal equivalent in Czech (eg. a good / false friend):

a. you usually prefer to use the formally non-equivalent expression (it is the “safer” option).

2 9%

b. you are aware of the fact that a potential error can occur here and, thus, you always consider the meaning such a word possesses in the given context; and only then you decide for the best solution.

21 91% One person marked b and c

c. Other suggestions: 1 4% “If it is not a word I know really well, I usually look it up in a dictionary because you never know :-)”

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18. If you have any other comments or suggestions concerning this topic, please, mention them here. Your comments and observations are most welcome.

“The problem is – mainly in literary translation – that one does not always want to “hide” the fact that a text is actually a translation. But where is the borderline between an error and on purpose foreignization (and how to

explain it to students?). Also, the perception very much depends on the reader ...” “I would like to hear you talk about your thesis, it sounds interesting, but I cannot quite figure out your

methodology.”